Status and Opportunities for Forest Resources Management Using Geospatial Technologies in Northeast India

Introduction

Forests provide a variety of environmental, economic, social and ecosystem services which are of immense importance for mankind. India is among the world’s top ten nations in terms of forest area with nearly 712,249 km² that is about 21.67% of India’s total geographical area (GFRA, 2015; ISFR, 2019). The Northeastern states of India cover roughly one-fourth of the forest area of the country accounting for over 17 million hectares (Dikshit and Dikshit, 2014). A range of ecological variations are witnessed due to the abrupt topographic variations in altitude ranging from 200-5000m. This consists of deep valleys and undulating hills giving rise to different climatic zones in different regions which eventually determine the vegetative pattern of this region. A varied vegetative pattern is seen here consisting of grasslands, meadows, scrub-forests, marshes, swamps, tropical forests, temperate forests and alpine vegetation. Moreover, this region is also bestowed with a number of sacred grove forests which have cultural and spiritual significance for the people in this region leading to rich biodiversity of this region. Due to its immensely rich flora and fauna, this region is also regarded as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots (Nayar, 1996; Dikshit and Dikshit, 2014).

According to the 16^th forest cover assessment by Forest Survey of India (FSI), the Northeastern states of India consists total forest cover of 1,70,541 km². The total forest cover of this region is highly distributed in states of Arunchal Pradesh (39.10%) and Assam (16.61%) followed by Mizoram (10.56%), Meghalaya (10.04%), Manipur (9.88%), Nagaland (7.32%), Tripura (4.53%) and Sikkim (1.96%). The information of geographical area of forest cover classes, such as, very dense forest, moderately dense forest and open forest in Northeast India sates is given in Table 1. It is observed that there is a significant decrease in forest cover in this region. All the top 5 states in India showing a decrease in forest cover are a part of Northeast India namely, Mizoram (531 sq km), Nagaland (450 sq km) and Arunachal Pradesh (190 sq km) followed by Tripura (164 sq km) and Meghalaya (116 sq km) between 2015-2017 (ISFR, 2017). Thus, conservation of these forests is highly critical.