TITLE:
Remote Sensing and GIS Application on Forest Resource Mapping and Monitoring in Bulolo District, Morobe Province
AUTHORS:
Wilson Kumne, Sailesh Samanta
KEYWORDS:
Remote Sensing, GIS, Land Use and Land Cover Classification, Forest Change
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection,
Vol.7 No.2,
February
15,
2019
ABSTRACT: Forest resources monitoring are particularly challenging for tropical forest
due to their diverse composition and structure and a wide range of stakeholder’s
expectations and requirement. New monitoring approaches and
control policies directions are required to meet these different challenges. For
the past decades, much of the focus of formal forest monitoring and management
policy in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been on large scale conventional
harvesting to meet national requirements for economic development,
with little attention given to community or small area forest management and
monitoring. The current management is considered to be unsustainable and,
as forest resources from primary forests are exhausted. This has resulted in
extensive cutover forest areas being left to degrade over time. Forest reserve
has suffered seriously and if the present trend of deforestation continues; it is
just a matter of time when the whole reserve would have been converted to a
bare ground. This study therefore examined the integration of remote sensing
(RS) and geographic information system (GIS) application on forest resource
mapping and monitoring in Bulolo district, Morobe province. Landsat satellite
imageries for 1992, 2002 and 2014 were used to classify and identify forest
changes through change detection techniques. A GIS database of land use
categories and their location within 24 years (1992-2014) were generated and
analysed with the aid of GIS analytical functions. This function includes area
calculation, overlay, and image differencing, supervised classifications, cross
tabulations and map representation. The result shows that population growth
(anthropogenic) factors among communities around the natural forest imposes
a lot of pressure on the natural forest resources. This should also include
consideration of the future usage capacity of the forest resources as well
as development of the capacity of local forest owner communities to participate
in small scale forest management and utilization.