Geospatial approach for ecosystem change study of Lombok Island under the influence of climate change

Lombok Island is categorized as a small island with an area of 4738.7 km(2) which makes it susceptible to climate change. Climate change is thought to have reduced the ability of forest biophysical and can cause damage to the ecosystem or a shifting of forest ecosystems. The purpose of this study is to identify the ecosystem changes in Lombok Island based on historical climate data and also to identify the vegetation domination based on ground truth result. Research study area covers the entire area of Lombok Island, West Nusa Tenggara. Data analysis was performed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze the spatial distribution of ecosystem zones. Spatial data processing was performed by interpolation method to estimate values at unknown locations or adjacent points. Ecosystem types in this study were determined by Holdridge Life Zones which are generated from historical climate data from 1975 to 2012 and described by the time series map of 1975, 1995, and 2012. The result indicates that ecosystem change occurred in Lombok Island which has shown in time series map of ecosystem zone. There were only five life zones in 2012 which were tropical moist forest, tropical dry forest, tropical very dry forest, subtropical wet forest and subtropical moist forest. The tropical dry forest was seen to dominate the area of Lombok Island in 2012. The ground truth result shown that the vegetation domination matches each ecosystem zone in the recent time. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.