Human-induced Land Use/Land-cover Change and Bioresource Management in Bura Chapori Wildlife Sanctuary in North-East India

The Bura chapori wildlife sanctuary (BCWLS) is located in the south bank of the mighty river Brahmaputra in Assam, north-eastern India. The sanctuary has a mosaic of several types of land use systems that forms the habitat for several important flora and fauna that plays a key role in the ecological functioning of this floodplain tropical forest. In order to understand the health and functional status of ecosystem, a multi-temporal analysis of the land use/land cover (LULC) was done using six available satellite datasets (1972, 1980, 1987, 1999, 2009 and 2011) to assess trends in LULC for six land use systems such as water/wetlands, forest, grassland, agriculture, built-up/settlement and sand/barren land. Amongst land use systems, forest significantly declined in the past two decades, but showed a gradual stabilisation between 1999 and 2011. The builtup (+304%) and cultivated land (+689%) areas however continuously increased from 1972 to 2011. This clearly reveals the anthropogenic pressures on the sanctuary that could potentially threaten the very existence of wildlife population. Therefore, clear strategies for ecological management of the BCWLS are warranted balancing the livelihood vis-à-vis socio-cultural settings of resident communities.