Author(s)

Wilson Kumne, Sailesh Samanta^*

Department of Surveying and Land Studies, GIS Section, Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Lae, PNG.

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.

Remote Sensing, GIS, Land Use and Land Cover Classification, Forest Change

Kumne, W. and Samanta, S. (2019) Remote Sensing and GIS Application on Forest Resource Mapping and Monitoring in Bulolo District, Morobe Province. Journal of Geoscience and Environment Protection, 7, 37-48. doi: 10.4236/gep.2019.72003.