Assessment of Forest Fragmentation and Wildlife Corridor A Case Study of Kanha-Pench and Nagzira-Navegaon Corridors of Central India

Corridors are important geographic feature for biodiversity conservation and wildlife movement. Development of forest connectivity and corridors are critical for biodiversity conservation, and also ensure energy and genetic exchange across greater spatial extent. Increasing human population, demand for food, fodder and transportation have leads to natural land cover degradation, resulting a habitat degradation, biodiversity loss, and ecological instability. Thus, proper evaluation, investigation and change detections are required for conservation of biodiversity and their habitat at the broad landscape level. Establishment of corridors as protected area is necessary for promoting sustainable forest management and wildlife movement. This study deals with assessment of forest fragmentation, change detection, and corridor analysis of Kanha-Pench and Nagzira-Navegaon corridors of central India. Efforts were made to in the forest cover vis-à-vis status of corridors of the three periods i.e. 1990, 2001 and 2009 using remote sensing and GIS technique. The ERDAS Imagine, Arc GIS, Quantum GIS and FRAGSTATS software package were used for this purpose.