Peat land development has caused swamp forest degradation in Central Kalimantan Province. The degradation betwen 1991-1997 reached 1.9% per year. This increased to 6.5% per year between 1997-2000.
Careful observation shows that forest degradation in Central Kalimantan is still continuing. This has happened because of the minimal forest management efforts that take into account all of the interests of everyone that can prevent forest fires and peat burning.
According to Ir. Raden Mas Sukarna, M.Sc., one of the efforts to support swamp forest management is the availability of adequate information about factual condition, such as forest structure and floristic conditions. Such information should be provided at a relatively low cost and easy to use. Information of natural forest conditions, which is obtained through the transformation of NDVI Citra Landsat, SPOT-4 and etc, in his observations can not fully describe the condition of forest structure and floristic distribution.
On the other hand, the activities in natural forest inventory are no longer terrestrially done due to funding, time, and energy problems. "Condition like this became serious, because on the other side, forest developments and changes take place relatively fast," he explained, Saturday (10/10).
The Lecturer of Department of Forestry, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Palangkaraya (Unpar) delivered this issue in an open examination of the doctoral program at the Faculty of Geography, UGM. In front of the examiner team, he defended his dissertation entitled "Study of Spectral Image of Landsat 7 ETM + for Floristic Swamp Forest modeling in Sebangau National Park, Central Kalimantan Province." Dr. Hartono, D.E.S.S., D.E.A., was the supervisor, while the co-supervisors were Prof. Dr. Ir. Simon Hasanu and Prof. Dr. Dulbahri.
He said that through the Forest Canopy Density (FCD) of the Citra Landsat 7 ETM + which combines vegetation index, bare soil index, shadow index, and temperature index, forest structure variations and floristic patterns distribution has not been produced. Swamp forest inventory model like this would help efforts to improve natural forest management model, especially in the swamp forests.
The man born in Tanjung, July 27, 1962, who is also an alumnus of Faculty of Geography UGM in post-graduate Remote Sensing Studies Program, has found that the distribution patterns of swamp forest structure can not be done effectively, if it only uses the composite image. This is because the information provided is very general. It is similar to the application of index image of vegetation density. This application still has many weaknesses to determine the forest structure due to the cover density value of grass and young shrubs that is higher than that of trees. "The improvement, by integrating canopy shadow index (SI) and temperature index (TI), is needed to be done," he said.
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