Presenter : BHARATH SETTURU

Type:  Poster

Drastic land use land cover changes (LULC) in forest landscape alters the functional ability of forest ecosystem, evident from decline in quantity and duration of water flow in streams, loss of carbon sequestration potential, etc. affecting the local livelihood, while inducing changes in the climate. This necessitates inventorying, mapping and monitoring of LULC dynamics to evolve appropriate location specific mitigation strategies. The LULC dynamics can be assessed effectively through free and open source software using temporal remote sensing data and modeling and forecasting techniques. The current research work aims to identify spatio-temporal land use changes from 2007-2016 in Kaiga Nuclear Power house (NPH) and its environs with the help of GRASS GIS (a robust free and open source software). Land uses in 2022 is predicted through Cellular Automata–Markov Chain model with the knowledge of land use transitions during the four decades. Validation of the model is done using Kappa indices, which shows good accuracy due to agreement of the predicated and actual land uses. The region has lost forest cover from 23 to 16.81 % (2016-2022) with an increase of built-up are of 42.01 to 46.81 % (2016-2022). The land use modeling, planning and policy by implying ecological science perspectives can improve understanding of ecological processes. The recent study reports of higher instances of cancer in humans with the functioning of NPH during the last decade. Any further expansion of NPH area would have serious ecological implications due to loss of vast tracts of forests, farmlands and would threaten the health and livelihood of local population.

Keywords: FOSS; EIA, Land use Land cover, CA-Markov, Central Western Ghats