Author(s)

Anwar Sajjad^1*, Ahmad Hussain², Umar Wahab¹, Syed Adnan³, Saqib Ali⁴, Zahoor Ahmad⁵, Ashfaq Ali⁶

¹Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Haripur, Haripur, Pakistan.
²Department of Forestry and Wildlife, University of Haripur, Haripur, Pakistan.
³Institute of Geographical Information Systems, National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan.
⁴Hubei Insect Resources Utilization and Sustainable Pest Management Key Laboratory, College of Plant Science and Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China.
⁵Department of Plant Pathology, College of Plant Science and Technology and the Key Lab of Crop Disease Monitoring & Safety Control in Hubei Province, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China.
⁶College of Horticulture and Forestry Sciences, Huazhong Agriculture University, Wuhan, China.

The forests of Pakistan replicate plentiful climatic, physiographic and edaphic differences in the country and these forests face a serious problem of deforestation. Geographic information system (GIS) techniques and remote sensing (RS) from satellite platforms offer a best way to identify those areas of deforestation, and thus a GIS and RS based study was conducted in tehsil Barawal, district Dir (U) to analyze forest cover change. The main objectives of the study were to: 1) identify different classes of land use and land cover, and its spatial distribution in the study area; 2) determine the trend, nature, location and magnitude of forest cover change; and 3) prepare maps of forest-cover change in different time periods in the study area. To assess the objectives remote sensing and GIS techniques were utilized. A supervised image classification technique was applied on Landsat 5 satellite images of 2000 and 2012. Five main classes such as agriculture, forest, barren land, snow and water were identified. The results showed that the area of forest, barren land, agriculture, water and snow in year 2000 was 49.54%, 43.38%, 5.19%, 1.40% and 0.49% and the area in 2012 was 37.17%, 41.36%, 12.69%, 5.05% and 3.72% respectively. Furthermore 2.02% decrease in barren land, 12.37% decrease in forest and 7.5% increase in agriculture land were identified. Due to high deforestation rate and increased agricultural activities, it is recommended that awareness campaign should be launched in the study area to protect and conserve this forest from further deforestation.

Deforestation, Change Analysis, Forest Cover Change

Sajjad, A. , Hussain, A. , Wahab, U. , Adnan, S. , Ali, S. , Ahmad, Z. and Ali, A. (2015) Application of Remote Sensing and GIS in Forest Cover Change in Tehsil Barawal, District Dir, Pakistan. American Journal of Plant Sciences, 6, 1501-1508. doi: 10.4236/ajps.2015.69149.