ABSTRACT
Cyclones, floods, and storm surges threaten the fragile Sundarban Biosphere Reserve of India. Super cyclone Amphan on 20 May 2020, devastated Indian Sundarban. Using support vector machine, this study sought to identify vegetation degradation and its effects on land use/land cover (LULC). In this analysis, Sentinel-2A with 10-m resolution has been utilized to evaluate the progressions of pre-cyclone and post-cyclone conditions. Additionally, using the confusion matrix, the accuracy of these methods was assessed. The LULC change detection has been analysed following an accuracy assessment. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) maps were produced for pre-cyclone and post-cyclone. NDVI threshold value before and after cyclone clearly shows that dense vegetation converted to sparse vegetation and fallow land. The result indicates that the super cyclone Amphan caused a significant reduction in forest cover of about 38.8% across the world. Additionally, there is a 49.51%, 39.57%, 17.40%, and 6.93% expansion of agricultural land, swamp, sand, and beaches respectively. The findings of the study may be used by local and state disaster management agencies to create efficient disaster management strategies.
