ABSTRACT
The Mangrove forests in many parts of the world are declining at an unprecedented pace, perhaps much faster than tropical inland forests. The largest block of tidal halophytic mangrove forests in the world, Sundarbans, is located on the East Coast of India and southwest Bangladesh and plays a key role in maintaining the environmental sustainability of the country and the world as a whole. This study examined the effects of the intense tropical cyclone ‘Amphan’ (20 May 2020) on the Indian Sundarbans by quantifying the areal extent of the mangrove cover before and after the cyclone. The supervised classification using the algorithm of Random Forest (RF) Classifier was carried out over Sentinel-1 C-band SAR imageries acquired before and after the cyclone. The study shows that 92.79 km2 of mangrove cover had already been lost before the arrival of ‘Amphan’, which increased to 375 km2 after the advent of the cyclone. It further indicates that ‘Amphan’ has destroyed approximately 13.4% (283.16 km2) of mangroves of Indian Sundarbans. This study, based on remote sensing techniques, has been supported by field verification to demonstrate better efficiency and promptness of remote sensing applications.
