Landscape-level analysis of disturbance regimes in Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary, a protected area of Western Ghats, India

The degradation, fragmentation, and depletion of forests have occurred all over the world, simultaneously, with the exponential growth of the human population. The present study assesses the forest disturbance regime of Chinnar Wildlife Sanctuary (CWS), an ecologically significant biodiversity hotspot of Western Ghats (WG) through satellite image-based forest and land cover mapping and landscape metric analysis. The on-screen analysis based on field knowledge, facilitated, mapping of seven types of vegetation cover. The majority of forest area was covered by dry deciduous forest (39.2 km(2) or 43.15%), whereas the minimum area was covered by disturbed forest (2.05 km(2) or 2.26%). The disturbance index (DI) was calculated by linearly combining the land use land cover (LULC), road and settlement closeness, fire risk, porosity, patchiness interspersion, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and fragmentation through a probabilistic weight-based linear additive model. The values of the DI (120-310) reclassified into four classes viz. low, moderate, high, and very high. The results revealed that 74.62 km(2) (82.52%) of the forest area has low to moderate disturbance, while the rest of the forest area that is 15.8 km(2) (17.48%) has high to very high disturbance. These analyses are based on remote sensing and GIS crucial for forest conservation and management strategies formulation.