Wildlife habitat mapping using Sentinel-2 imagery of Mehao Wildlife Sanctuary, Arunachal Pradesh, India

Mehao Wildlife Sanctuary, situated in the state of Arunachal Pradesh, is part of an important biodiversity hotspot in the north-eastern part of India in the Himalayas. The current study deals with the identification of important wildlife habitats in the sanctuary. We used a supervised classification technique to delineate these habitats in the sanctuary, which are used by several mammals and bird species encountered during camera trap and sign surveys conducted between November 2017 and May 2020. Satellite images from Sentinel – 2A were used to classify the land use land cover (LULC) of the sanctuary. The LULC information was generated by using a maximum likelihood classifier. We classified a total of thirteen LULC classes, i.e., water, built-up, agriculture, orchard, grassland, bamboo forest, bamboo-mixed forest, riverbed, barren land, snow, wild banana, riverine forest and mixed forest. LULC classification reveals a high percentage of mixed forest, about 69.9%, followed by wild bananas at 7.2%. The commission and omission error rates, however, are high for riverbed and agriculture (0.5) and bamboo forest (0.5), respectively. The accuracy assessment showed an overall classification accuracy of 88.5% with a Kappa coefficient of 0.87. The abundance of mammals was high in the mixed forest, but Ivlev's electivity index shows that species generally avoided this habitat and preferred specialized forest habitats, such as bamboo forest, bamboo-mixed forest, grassland, riverbed and riverine forest. Our LULC map will provide a baseline for potential planning and monitoring changes of wildlife habitats in Mehao WLS.