Spatial Modeling in Forest Resources Management

Pravat Kumar Shit is an Assistant Professor at the PG Department of Geography, Raja N. L. Khan Women’s College (Autonomous), West Bengal, India. He received his M.Sc & Ph.D. degrees in Geography from Vidyasagar University and PG Diploma in Remote Sensing & GIS from Sambalpur University. His research interests include soil erosion spatial modelling, groundwater, forest resources and natural resources mapping & modeling. He has published five books (three books in Springer) and more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Hamid Reza Pourghasemi is an Associate Professor of Watershed Management Engineering at the College of Agriculture, Shiraz University, Iran. He holds a B.Sc, an M.Sc, and PhD in Watershed Management Engineering from the University of Gorgan, Iran, and Tarbiat Modares University, Iran, respectively. His main research interests are GIS-based spatial modeling using machine learning/data mining techniques in different fields, such as landslide, flood, gully erosion, forest fire, land subsidence, species distribution modeling, and groundwater/hydrology. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in high-quality journals. Also, he published two books with Springer.Pulakesh Das received his Ph.D. from the Indian Institution of Technology Kharagpur, India. Currently he is teaching as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Remote Sensing & GIS, Vidyasagar University, West Bengal, India. He completed his B.Sc in Physics and M.Sc in Remote Sensing & GIS at the same university. His research areas include land use and forest cover modeling, hydrological modeling, study of forest cover dynamics and climate change, and digital image processing. He has published more than 15 research articles in respected, peer-reviewed journals.Gouri Sankar Bhunia received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta, India. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on environmental control of infectious disease using geospatial technology. His research interests include environmental modeling, risk assessment, natural resources mapping and modeling, data mining and information retrieval using geospatial technology. Dr. Bhunia has published more than 60 articles in various leading journals

• Forest Resources Measurement, Monitoring and Mapping.- Application of RS-GIS-R for forest resources assessment, monitoring, and modeling.- Assessment and measurement of forest resources for sustainable land use planning.- Species diversity mapping and modeling.- Afforestation.- Soil-Water-Vegetation Relationship.- Modeling, Risk Assessment, and Vulnerability.- Forest biomass and carbon stock modeling.- Remote sensing based deforestation analysis.- Forest and habitats suitability analysis.- Habitats and species modeling.- Google Earth Engine and its application in forest sciences.- Rural livelihood and Sustainable Management.- The role of timber and non-timber forest products in poverty reduction.- The role of communities in sustainable land and forest management.- Politics of co-optation: community forest management versus joint forest management.- Open source satellite data and GIS for forest resources mapping and monitoring.- Recent trends in forest resources management and land useplanning.