FOREST CARBON MANAGEMENT USING SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUES A CASE STUDY OF SAGAR DISTRICT (M. P.)

Forests play an important role in the global carbon balance; as both carbon sources and sinks, they have the potential to form an important component in efforts to combat global climate change. In the last few years there has been an increasing tendency to consider forest ecosystems as possible sinks of carbon dioxide. In this way, it is attempted to mitigate the dramatic increase of global emissions of CO2 gas in the industrialised areas. TheIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that 1.86 billion tons of carbon is released annually due to land use change, of which the major part is tropical deforestation, and it is a major source of carbon emissions and an active contributor to global warming. In this paper, some recent experiences in this direction were critically reviewed and some new ideas have been considered. With this purpose in mind Sagar District (M.P.) has been selected for the case study. Some resent methodology i.e. sample plot-hybrid ground based method, RS-LULC based method, vegetation index (NDVI) based method, ESRI-ArcGIS based InVEST-Model, modified 3PGS-model, and NLLUF-KP10 model (Pareta, 2010)1 have been used in this study. This study describes an effort to estimate carbon stock using remote sensing for Sagar district. Satellite remote sensing data has been used as a primary data source for fores