Abstract

Forests have important and vital global ecological as well as socio-economic resources and they require a sustainable management. An attempt has been made in this research to monitor, record data as well as to have a systematic understanding of the forest map development and to map the existing forest coverage in context of cost effectiveness and time consumption. The aim of this study has, to map the existing forest, to identify unutilized land, to develop a plan to increase the existing forest coverage and carry out the related analysis. For this purpose, RS and GIS data have been compiled within the ERDAS and ArcGIS environments. The data acquired from Punjab Forest Department has been standardized and joined to spatial datasets produced to go for micro-level forest mapping, monitoring up gradation and plan development. It has been concluded that with the help of RS and GIS techniques one can perform spatial analysis and capable of highlighting issues and problems for planning, monitoring and management of forest system.