Automated Mapping for Long-Term Analysis of Shifting Cultivation in Northeast India

Assessment of the spatio-temporal dynamics of shifting cultivation is important to understand the opportunities for land restoration. The past studies on shifting cultivation mapping of North-East (NE) India lack systematic assessment techniques. We have developed a decision tree-based multi-step threshold (DTMT) method for consistent and long-term mapping of shifting cultivation using Landsat data from 1975 to 2018. Widely used vegetation indices such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and its relative difference NBR (RdNBR) were integrated with the suitable thresholds in the classification, which yielded overall accuracy above 85%. A significant decrease in total shifting cultivation area was observed with an overall reduction of 75% from 1975–1976 to 2017–2018. The methodology presented in this study is reproducible with minimal inputs and can be useful to map similar changes by optimizing the index threshold values to accommodate relative differences for other landscapes. Furthermore, the crop-suitability maps generated by incorporating climate and soil factors prioritizes suitable land use of shifting cultivation plots. The Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform was employed for automatic mapping of the shifting cultivation areas at desired time intervals for facilitating seamless dissemination of the map products. Besides the novel DTMT method, the shifting cultivation and crop-suitability maps generated in this study, can aid in sustainable land management.