Forest Cover

Forest Survey of India carry-out Assessment of Forest cover and changes in it at the interval of two years. The forest cover as assessed by Forest Survey of India includes all lands which has a tree canopy density of 10 percent and above and have a minimum area of one hectare. The forest cover reported by FSI encompasses all types of lands irrespective of their ownership, land use and legal status. The satellite based remote sensing data of LISS-III is used by FSI in the forest cover assessment.

Classification of forest for assessment tree cover is as follows.

Class	Description
Very Dense Forest	Tree canopy density of 70% and above.
Moderately Dense Forest	Tree canopy density of 40% and more but less than 70%.
Open Forest	Tree canopy density of 10% and more but less than 40%.
Scrub	Degraded forest lands with canopy density less then 10%.
Non-forest	Lands not included in the above classes .

Density Class wise Forest Cover in the state

As per the report of Forest Survey of India, (FSI, 2017) the total forest cover of the state is 14757 sq km. Out of this total forest cover, 378 sq kms is Very Dense forest, 5200 sq km is dense forests and 9179 sq km is open forests. In addition, the State has 2194 sq km of scrub forests. In terms of percentage, 11.16% of the total Forest area of the State falls under Open forests while 2.66% is Dense Forests. The very dense category of forest is 0.19% of the total forest area while 0.76% are Scrub forests in the state as perTable-1 and Figure-4.

During the assessment year 2017, the Forest Cover has been found to have an increase of 97 sq km as compared to that of the assessment year 2015.