dc.description.abstract | Sri Lanka is one of the few surviving countries in the world with an extensive natural
forest cover, however, most of the existing forests have been impacted by changing en vironmental conditions and escalating disturbances. To preserve our forest environment,
investigating its temporal resilience is important. Forest Resilience is the capacity of
forests to recover from disturbances in which they experience undesired shifts from their
original state to available alternative stable. This research study mainly focused to analyze
the resilience of forests Wilpattu National Park and Kanneliya Rain Forest with a time
series of the Landsat 8/9 and Sentinel 1 satellite imagery during the period of the year
2017 to 2022 by generating Forest Resilience Index (FRI). In this study, Landsat 8/9 and
Sentinel 1 satellite images were used to create the NDVI, LAI and Radar Vegetation Index
(RVI) layers. Then a time series analysis was conducted with values of NDVI, LAI and
RVI. The final outcomes of Forest Resilience Indices were generated with NDVI and RVI.
The FRI for Wilpattu National Park is 0.7827NDVI + 0.2173RVI and for Kanneliya Rain
Forest is 0.7853NDVI + 0.2147RVI. The validation was conducted with generated FRI for
the Upper Wilpattu area, and it was succeeded. This analysis has helped to evaluate the
temporal variability which indicates the resilient dynamics of the Sri Lankan forests. | en_US |