MODELING PRECIPITATION DEPENDENT FOREST RESILIENCE IN INDIA

摘要

The impact of long term climate change that imparts stress on forest could be perceived by studying the regime shift of forest ecosystem. With the change of significant precipitation, forest may go through density change around globe at different spatial and temporal scale. The 100 class high resolution (60 meter spatial resolution) Indian vegetation type map was used in this study recoded into four broad categories depending on phrenology as (i) forest, (ii) scrubland, (iii) grassland and (iv) treeless area. The percentage occupancy of forest, scrub, grass and treeless were observed as 19.9?%, 5.05?%, 1.89?% and 7.79?% respectively. Rest of the 65.37?% land area was occupied by the cropland, built-up, water body and snow covers. The majority forest cover were appended into a 5?km?×?5?km grid, along with the mean annual precipitation taken from Bioclim data. The binary presence and absence of different vegetation categories in relates to the annual precipitation was analyzed to calculate their resilience expressed in probability values ranging from 0 to 1. Forest cover observed having resilience probability (Pr) 2/sup) of total forest cover in India, which was 4.3?%