Vegetation Change Detection in India Using MODIS Satellite Images

Abstract: Due to man made events and natural causes many regions are currently undergoing rapid and wide ranging changes in land cover globally including developing and developed countries. India is one of them where land use and land cover change are taking place at a rapid pace. Forests are the most valuable natural resources available to the mankind on planet earth. On the one hand, they are the essential source of livelihood for the poor and marginalized sections of the society; on the other hand they provide furniture and other items of desire for the rich. Forest land cover change is an important input for modeling ecological and environmental processes at various scales. Rapid delineation in naturally forested regions is one of the major environmental issues facing the world today. It has been estimated that vegetation change threatens about one sixth of the world's population and one quarter of global terrestrial land. Vegetation cover plays a key role in terrestrial biophysical process and is related to a number of ways to the dynamics of global climate. Monitoring seasonal changes in vegetation activity and crop phenology over wide areas is essential for many applications, such as estimation of net primary production, deciding time boundary conditions for crop yield modeling and supporting decisions about water supply. Vegetations are the major part of land cover and their changes have an important influence on the energy and mass biochemical cycles and are also a key indicator of regional ecological environment change. Urbanization, demand of land for agriculture and demand of timbers for industrial purposes are the main reasons of manmade natural forest destruction. Though we are planting trees through reforestation and afforestation programs but these new forests never can be the representative of natural forest. In order to understand and manage environment at large variety of temporal and spatial scales, up-to-date and reliable information is required all the time. Remote Sensing is a valuable data source which can provide us land-use/land-cover change information on a continuous basis with very high accuracy. Remotely sensed data like aerial photographs and satellite images are the only option that allows detecting land cover changes on a large scale. Satellite images have the potential of offering the most accurate and latest information compared to statistical, topographic or land use maps. In this study an attempt has been made in analyzing vegetation change detection that took place between 2000 and 2005 using Terra MODIS 32 day 500m time series data on a monthly basis. With the launch of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) onboard aqua and terra platform, a new generation of satellite sensor data is now available. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index method has been employed for accurate classification of images and has proved to be successful.