Appraisal of Deforestation in Murree through Open Source Satellite Imagery

Forests are the main source of income for humans and shelter for many rare in habitants. Forests act as carbon sink and help to reduce the effect of natural hazards like floods. The timber is among the main products of forests used for precious furniture. Forest must cover one third of the part of any country but in Pakistan, it covers less than 4%. If the deforestation continues with the same ratio, there will be a drastic change in the upcoming years. The main objective of the study is to determine deforestation rates in Murree for the years 1999-2015 through open source Landsat 7, 8 imageries. The areas with high deforestation rates are also delineated. Supervised classification is used to delineate the area under buildup, vegetation and water that was 83.85 km2, 760.63 km2 and 1.18 km2 respectively in 1999. Built up area increased up to 20% and forests declined by 23% in 2015 as compared to 1999. Remote sensing and GIS tools helped to investigate the deforestation rates with high accuracy.