Abstract

The Assam-Khasi hills border area with its ironic natural endowments and resource luxuriance craft a hot spot for GIS application in forest resource assessment. Increasing population and transforming land use pattern in the regions is molding an intricate inconsistent man-environment relationship with perpetual enigma between wildlife conservation and livelihood necessities of people. Change matrix is constructed by using Change Detection and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) for comparison of the temporal shift in land cover along with the wetlands as well as swamps, contiguous to piedmont areas of Khasi hills using the LANDSAT 7 and LISS III imageries. In this melting pot of nature, encroachment of forest and developmental activities adjacent to ecologically opulent wetlands cause man and wild animal conflict as well as jeopardy of environmental degradation. With the help of Remote Sensing and GIS, special emphasis on geo-ecological change like the impact of urbanization, depletion of wild habitat, man-animal conflict and a relationship between surface runoff and land cover changes have been done.

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