Land Cover Changes from 1990 to 2019 in Papua, Indonesia: Results of the Remote Sensing Imagery

Sri Murniani Angelina Letsoin, David Herak, Fajar Rahmawan and Ratna Chrismiari Purwestri
Additional contact information
Sri Murniani Angelina Letsoin: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Kamycka 129, 16500 Praha-Suchdol, Czech Republic
David Herak: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Kamycka 129, 16500 Praha-Suchdol, Czech Republic
Fajar Rahmawan: INTSIA Foundation of Papua Province, Furia 3 Number 116 Abepura, Jayapura City, Papua 99225, Indonesia
Ratna Chrismiari Purwestri: Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Kamycka 129, 16500 Praha-Suchdol, Czech Republic

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 16, 1-18

Abstract: Long-term land cover changes play a significant driver of ecosystem and function of natural biodiversity. Hence, their analysis can be used for evaluating and supporting government plans, especially conservation and management of natural habitats such as sago palm. In Papua Province of Indonesia, sago palm has been stated as one of the priority plants in the Medium-Term Development Plan (R.P.J.M.). However, limited studies have examined this palm in one of the Regencies of Papua Province, namely, Merauke Regency. In this study, we performed remotely sensed data imagery and supervised classification to produce land cover maps from 1990 to 2019. During the study period, twenty-one land cover classes were identified. The six classes of the natural forest consist of primary dryland forest, secondary dryland forest, primary mangrove forest, secondary mangrove forest, primary swamp forest, and secondary swamp forest; thus, fifteen classes of non-forested area. Concerning the sago palm habitat, our study evaluated two different categories (1) based on the land cover scheme from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and (2) according to the peatland land cover ecosystem in Papua. Based on paired samples t -test, the result indicated statistically significant changes specifically at primary dryland ( p -value = 0.015), grassland ( p -value = 0.002) and swamp ( p -value = 0.007). Twelve from 20 districts of Merauke Regency tend to lose the forecasted natural habitat of the sago palm. Therefore, this study suggests the further need to recognize and estimate the yield of sago palm area in these various ecosystems.

Keywords: land cover; Merauke Regency; sago palm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6623/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/16/6623/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:16:p:6623-:d:399657

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().