Pant, Daya Nand
Landuse /land cover Change Pattern
The spatial distribution of Change and No Change categories indicate their pattern in different locations (Fig. 3). The map
shows that most of the changes have taken place surrounding the villages and Mussoorie town area and along roadsides.
Out of total 64.0 km^ area of Mussoorie municipality , 17.2 Km ? or 26.9 % of total area has undergone changes. The
maximum change has taken place in Oak forests followed by scrub/shrub, agriculture, habitation, and Oak -Pine,
Miscellaneous and others in descending order (Table 1). The Mussoorie town area itself increased by 39 % during 35 years
or 1% per year. Almost all these changes are negative. The increase in Pine forest and decrease in Oak forest indicate
retrogression of forest quality due to high biotic pressure causing a drier condition of land.
Impact of Changes
The present and past conditions, the positive and negative trends experienced by the people of the area, traditional
indigenous knowledge of the key informants and the available secondary information indicate that the impacts are in
descending order of magnitude of less rainfall, less yields, less ground / spring water, less wildlife in forest area and more
wildlife close to the village area (in average less) , violent and untimely rainfall, less snowfall and high temperature (Table
4). Allthese are negative impacts towards the surrounding environment and the existing agro-ecosystem.
Type of negative No of % of total
impacts responses Responses
Less rain fall 43 24.1
Less yield 40 22.3
Less ground/spring water 36 20.2
More and less wildlife 21 11.8
Violent and untimely rain 19 10.7
Less snowfall 11 6.2
High temperature 8 4.5
Total 178 100.0
Table 4. Impact of forest vegetation and landuse changes
ACCURACY ESTIMATION
Accuracy estimation has been carried out based on the ground verification of 95 points distributed over all the classes of
map showing forest vegetation and landuse change dynamics. The field conditions of 1960 and 1985 have been assessed
on the basis of site specific interviews and direct field observations. The distribution of points was carried out in
accordance with the proportionate area of each class. The analysis of confusion matrix reflected the overall accuracy of
85.%. . But the accuracy is considerably increasing when the change mapping units are merged into 5 change types.
The maximum accuracy has been estimated as 100% where degraded forest was converted into lime stone quarry
followed by no change, Oak to degraded forest, Oak to habitation, degraded forest into scrub/shrub and all others in
descending order
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXIII, Part B7. Amsterdam 2000. 1117