Hotspot growing cold: The million city of Guwahati and its diminishing reserve forests.

Growing populations exert added pressure to their immediate environs and such equations are far more intense in developing country contents. The urban center of Guwahati is the only million city with a hinterland of 255,000 km2 in north east India. Its growing population pressure has had effects not merely within its city limits but in its surrounding areas as well. The Rani-Garbhanga (RG) reserve forests (RFs) on the southern fringe of the city has been one such victim. The city’s spillover population and forest extraction effects are assessed in terms of their effects on the RG forest landscape during 1991-2011. The losses in forest cover, vegetation greenness and quantum of fragmentation are quantified using Landsat data and Fragstats (McGarial et al.,2012) based landscape metrics. A decline of the forest landscape of RG, evidenced by declines in normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values along with an increasingly fragmented forest landscape has occurred with several ramifications. Low levels of governance has enabled illegal tree felling to flourish and certain parties profit from the forests. Protection of scarce resources has not received much priority in this region, its status as one of India’s two biodiversity hotspots notwithstanding.