Nearly 6 million trees disappeared from farmlands

Highlights:

• Additionally, 11% of such trees detected via satellite during 2010-2011 were no longer visible when reviewed from 2018 to 2022, leading the researchers to conclude that these trees had “disappeared”.
• However, this doesn’t necessarily imply that India’s overall tree cover, or trees outside forest, is declining.
  • as the analysis was specific to only large trees above a certain size.
• The latest FSI report says that India’s tree cover has increased in 2021 over 2019.
  • However, FSI only publishes data on the changes in acreage and not individual trees.
• The present analysis focuses on Indian farmlands and tracks individual trees, albeit only big ones, relying on maps from multiple ‘micro-satellites’, and machine learning analysis to estimate trends, beginning in 2010.
• The researchers combined satellite-imagery from two repositories which have resolutions of three to five metres, meaning that the satellite can “see” large trees, three to five metres apart, as individual trees.
  • Meanwhile, FSI relies on data from the Sentinel satellite that has a coarser resolution of 10 metres implying that they can tell apart blocks of trees but not individual ones.
• The disappearance of mature farmland trees was observed in many areas, but numbers rarely exceed five to 10%,
  • except for areas in central India, here, several hotspot areas have lost up to 50% of their large farmland trees, with up to 22 trees per square kilometre disappearing.
• The tree loss estimate was on the “conservative” side and most of the losses were likely between 2018 and 2020.

Prelims Takeaway:

• ISFR
• FSI