Mapping Greening & Browning in Chikkaballapur
CSEI’s Farms and Forests Initiative is conducting a land-use change analysis in Karnataka’s Chikkaballapur district with LibTech & FES.
By Karishma Shelar
Land is a critical natural resource on which depends the economic and social security and cultural identity of more than 600 million people in India. The IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land estimates that the global economic value generated from land-based ecosystem services such as food, fibre, fodder and timber is equivalent to the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Since climate change exacerbates land degradation, with a rise in extreme climate events, its cascading impact will be experienced by those whose livelihoods are directly dependent on land.
In India, the Alliance for Reversing Ecosystem Service Threats (AREST) estimates that nearly 12 million hectare of land is undergoing some form of degradation in the semi-arid and sub-humid regions of peninsular India outside of the protected areas.
The stressors of degradation are landscape driven and a one-size fits all approach may not be conducive for addressing the problem at scale. For long-term and sustainable land-use management, it is important to identify types and drivers of land degradation and the most socio-ecologically suitable restoration interventions. Which is why CSEI’s Farms and Forests Initiative is conducting a land-use change analysis in Karnataka’s Chikkaballapur district, in partnership with LibTech and the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES).
For this purpose, we are using a greening and browning (G&B) trend analysis, undertaken by AREST, to determine changes in land use over 20 years. For Chikkaballapur, we have identified clusters that geospatially indicate greening or browning in three types of ecosystems. These are open and natural habitats, cropland and riparian zones.
It is important to note here that greening does not necessarily indicate increased vegetation. For example, an increase in the spread of an invasive species like Prosopis may pop up as greening whereas browning may indicate loss of ecosystem service from a long-term land use change such as loss of riparian habitats.
We are working alongside 11 students from four different universities to validate the historical and current land use of these landscapes. The G&B analysis uses a geospatial technique called a Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) over a 20-year scale to indicate significant land-use change, which could be in the form of decline or increase in the availability of groundwater, urbanisation, change in cropping pattern, mining and/or spread of invasive species.
For data collection, we are using an application called ODK, an open source freely available software that allows for geo-referenced data collection. The form has been curated to collect data on multiple indicators such as land use, historical cropping patterns and types of crops, source of irrigation and availability of water, presence and dependence on invasive species such as Prosopis and use and dependence on gomala or common lands.
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Since the ODK form is intuitive and easy to use, we did not require students to have any previous knowledge of geospatial techniques. The partners kick-started the data collection process by conducting a thorough one-day orientation with the student participants to acquaint them with the objective of the exercise and with a basic introduction to land use terminologies. This was followed by a site demonstration to use the ODK. The students were then split into four groups and allotted G&B points for ground truthing.
We hope the exercise will contribute to developing a baseline for long-term monitoring and evaluating land use changes in the district. This will be a critical step towards co-designing restoration interventions with local stakeholders for Chikkaballapur and providing evidence to the district administration for effectively redirecting public finance allocations towards sustainable land management practices.
