Remote sensing based deforestation analysis in Mahanadi and Brahmaputra river basin in India since 1985

Farms or Forests? Understanding and Mapping Shifting Cultivation Using the Case Study of West Garo Hills, India

“…Some researchers in this region have also followed this approach [63,64], but a cursory visit to the region suggests that it will result in over-estimation of natural forest cover due to the ubiquity of regrowing fallows and horticultural plantations. Others that focus on mapping floristic classes of forest do, however, distinguish between natural forest and plantations [22]. But such forest-focused studies ignore shifting cultivation as a land-use, thereby implicitly including different phases of shifting cultivation in the different forest or non-forest classes.…”

“…But such forest-focused studies ignore shifting cultivation as a land-use, thereby implicitly including different phases of shifting cultivation in the different forest or non-forest classes. For instance, Behera, et al [22] distinguish 16 classes in their land-use change study covering 1985 to 2005. They define a fallow class and a wasteland class without clarifying what it contains, and do not have a separate class for active shifting cultivation or its cyclical fallows.…”

“…Otherwise, it is only found in the Wastelands Atlas as one of the categories of wasteland, pointing to an explicitly pejorative perspective about shifting cultivation. Other academic studies [22] also use such disparaging nomenclature while mapping land-cover/land-use in Northeast India. Overall, the lack of understanding of this land-use and bias about shifting cultivation are apparent.…”

“…Unfortunately, the literature shows wide discrepancies and fluctuations in these estimates. For instance, Talukdar, et al [21] claims the extent of shifting cultivation in Garo hills to be just 500 km 2 out of a total landscape of 8167 km 2 , while Behera, et al [22] identified no class as shifting cultivation, but mapped fallows and identified 281 sq. km area as wasteland in 2005 in 280,288 km 2 of Northeast India.…”

A Web‐Based Integrated Modeling and Simulation Method for Forest Growth Research

“…Forest growth simulations can provide insights into forest dynamics, predict forest yields, guide forest management decisions, and analyze the impact of the environment on forests (Huang et al, 2019;Jandl et al, 2013;Weiskittel et al, 2011). To provide additional economic benefits and improve the ecological environment, the whole forest growth process is usually separated into different subprocesses, which have been the focus for forest experts when analyzing changes of forest growth, including tree diameter growth (Adame et al, 2008;Almeida et al, 2010), height growth (Kearsley et al, 2017;Marziliano et al, 2013), crown width growth (Fu et al, 2013;Sharma et al, 2016), volume estimation (Del Río & Sterba, 2009;Neumann & Jandl, 2005), mortality (Bohlman & Pacala, 2012;Zhao et al, 2004), and deforestation (Bavaghar, 2015;Behera et al, 2018). Therefore, based on various modeling methods, including empirical modeling and process modeling, many forest growth models have been built for these subprocesses (Korzukhin et al, 1996;Pretzsch, 2009;Weiskittel et al, 2011;Burkhart & Tomé, 2012;Adams et al, 2013).…”