Remote sensing for developing an operational monitoring scheme for the Sundarban Reserved Forest, Bangladesh <engl.>

Sundarban Reserved Forest in Bangladesh is playing a significant role in local and national economy and is providing protection to the coastline as well as to the indigenous people. During the past decades and also in recent time this forest was heavily disturbed by human intervention in many aspects. As a consequence the resources of the forest are fragmenting, shrinking and declining, which in turn leads to an increasing failure of satisfying increasing demands both at local and national levels. Therefore accurate and continuously updated spatial information is needed for optimising forest management and environmental planning on both levels to support the fulfilment of urgent needs of sustainability of the forest. Considering the specific topography and the poor accessibility of the forest versus the task of collecting information, remote sensing is an attractive, if not the only means of obtaining sound full-coverage spatial information on forest cover of Sundarban. This research used medium resolution Landsat ETM data of November 2000 and Landsat TM data of January 1989 to assess and monitor the forest for 1. Identification of the operational tools for mapping and monitoring the forest as well as on the examination of the reliability of the application of multitemporal satellite remote sensing data for building spatial databases on forest cover in Sundarban. 2. Based on the existing management plan of the forest as well as the spectral properties of Landsat ETM imagery a level III classification system was developed. 3. This classification strategy was tested by applying several methods to achieve the classification result with the highest accuracy and thus to build the most reliable methodology for mapping forest cover in Sundarban. 4. Forest cover change was assessed for the period of eleven years. Significant changes have been observed due to illegal removal of trees from the forest although a governmental moratorium on banning timber extraction exists since 1989. 5. Development of an operational monitoring scheme by means of multitemporal satellite imagery analysis, which will allow concerned authorities to set up sustainable and appropriate monitoring of the Sundarban Reserved Forest.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Technische Universität Dresden

Year

2006

Author dc:creator

• Akhter, Mariam

Contributors dc:contributor

• Csaplovics, Elmar
• Köhl, Michael
• Müller, Bernhard

• Mangrove forest
• digital image classification
• change detection
• Mangrovenwald
• Klassifikation des digitalisierten Bildes
• Analyse der Veränderungen