TY - BOOK AU - Baby Swaya Salah (41618004) TI - Remote sensing based assessment of vegetation composition, phenology and fires in Eravikulam National Park, Kerala KW - VEGETATION COMPOSITION KW - PHENOLOGICAL METRICS KW - REMOTE SENSING KW - ERAVIKULAM NATIONAL PARK N1 - A forest ecosystem is the basic and most important ecological unit. The present study aimed to provide the spatial extent of the vegetation types, vegetation burnt area and baseline information on phenological metrics in Eravikulam national park, Kerala, India. To classify the land cover types of Eravikulam National Park, LISS 1V satellite imagery is used. Using object based image analysis, nine land cover classes are mapped. Sentinel 2 based NDVI datasets were downloaded using Google Earth Engine Code Editor as the input. The spatio-temporal analysis was made using NDVI values from Sentinel-2 data of 2018. The key phenological matrices are obtained using CropPhenology package by giving the multi-temporal NDVI images. In this study 15 phenological matrices are obtained which are used for further phenology analysis. It is found that except for the forest and the plantation, all other classes are distinguished on the basis of NDVI thresholds. But forest and plantation could not be classified separately since both the classes show high NDVI values due to the high canopy density throughout. IRS LISS III and Landsat 8 OLI data were used for burnt area assessment. Vegetation burnt areas are extracted using digital classification method for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019. Overall, grasslands area affected by fires quantified as 649 ha, 636 ha and 881 ha in 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively. Of the three years, 1723 ha of grassland area is under occasionally fire affected area, 381 ha is under frequently fire affected and 62 ha is under fire recurrence. Fire hotspots were studied using spatial statistics tool (optimised hotspot analysis). Spatial analysis indicates 1847 ha of dense grasslands and 416 ha of open grasslands are included under fire hotspots. Shola forests are included under coldspots due to no fires in the study period. ER -