Land Use and Land Cover Change Analysis of the Baroiyadhala National Park Using Remote Sensing and GIS

Baroiyadhala National Park is one of the important national parks which protects undisturbed tropical forests. The study analyzes land use and land cover change of this national park from 1978 to 2019 using Landsat MSS, Landsat TM, and Landsat OLI-TIRS images. ERDAS Imagine 2015 and ArcMap 10.4 were used to process five multi-temporal satellite images, and the maximum likelihood classification algorithm was used to derive supervised land use classification. The protected area has been classified into five land use/cover classes which are forest, agriculture, bare land, settlement, and water body. The overall accuracy for the five images ranged from 83% to 90%. According to Landsat imagery analysis, 124.78 ha of forest area changed to barren land and 66.91 ha of area changed to settlement from 1978 to 2019. On the other hand, 174.25 ha of bare land and 79.03 ha of agricultural land changed to forest area from the base year. Overall, 2.79% of forest coverage decreased over the last 41 years. From 1978 to 2019, settlement expanded rapidly from 1.09% to 5.75%. From the image analysis of 2019, forest covered 2057 ha area, agriculture covered 146.69 ha area, bare land covered 299.75 ha area, the settlement covered 168.68 ha area, and water body covered 261.45 ha area. Cross classification approach was performed to monitor the land conversion rate and pattern within the period. The study will provide baseline information to the park managers and decision-makers to take proper initiatives and formulate a management plan.