Assessment of Land Use/land Cover Change and Forest Fragmentation in Kohima District, Nagaland: A Mountainous Region of Northeast India

Land use/land cover (LULC) change is the result of numerous interactions between anthropogenic actions and natural processes. It has an impact on ecological processes, biological cycles and biodiversity, making it a significant contributor to global climate change. The loss of ecosystem is linked to forest fragmentation, which also has an adverse effect on biodiversity, forest degradation and the spatial organisation of the landscape. The current work aims to examine the changes in LULC followed by forest fragmentation of Kohima district, Nagaland, India over the time span of 22 years using geospatial approach. A supervised classification method was utilised to prepare LULC maps using Landsat satellite images for the years 2000 and 2022, respectively. The overall classification accuracies were found 80.50% and 81.13% for classified maps of years 2000 and 2022 respectively. The results reveal that during 2000–2022, agriculture land and forest area are decreased by 1.73% and 3.39% while built up, vegetation/grassland and water bodies are increased by 4.33%, 0.70% and 0.09% respectively. By utilising multi-temporal Landsat data, the current work also focused to evaluate and measure the spatial pattern of forest fragmentation during 2000–2022. The forest area is divided into four categories using the Landscape Fragmentation tool: patch, edge, perforated and core forest with 100-m edge width. The study reveals reduction in rich forest cover and is now in a poor condition, while built-up land use has continued to rise. The examination of forest land fragmentation showed a rise in deforestation and the deterioration of the thick forest into scattered, small-scale areas.