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The Decadal Response of Vegetation in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest to the Climate Variabilities: Observing from the Space

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Abstract

The Sundarbans being one of the most significant tropical mangroves in the globe supports a substantial amount of biodiversity. Understanding how this tropical mangrove will respond to recent global environmental changes remains crucial for its future existence. Thus, this study aims at understanding the long-term changes in the vegetation of the Sundarbans by using satellite data. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was utilized to discover the changes in flora in the Sundarbans mangrove forest (SMF) for the preceding 30 years (1989–2019) from Landsat imageries. Regardless of the prevalent apprehension about the impact of different climate variabilities, such as El Niño, Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), and ENSO Precipitation Index (ESPI), SMF is currently in its recovery stage with the increased extent of dense and moderate vegetation. Severe degradation of this mangrove forest in 2009 predominantly coincided with extreme events (consecutive cyclones) at that period, whereas changes in the other two decades were quasi-natural and did not reveal any significant correlation to different climatic indices. The existence of improved management policies, restriction of random entries, and cutting down trees, concurring with a salinity increase, give opportunistic mangrove species, a chance to grow which contributed to the present rate of repossession of SMF.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study will be made available on reasonable request.

Code Availability

The codes used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge two anonymous scientists at National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India, for their valuable comments and edits of this manuscript. We are thankful to the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LP DAAC), located at the US Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center (lpdaac.usgs.gov), and the Integrated Climate Data Center (ICDC, icdc.cen.uni-hamburg.de), University of Hamburg, Germany. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, or JAMSTEC, the Earth System Research Laboratory which is a laboratory in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, and the US National Center for Atmospheric Research are major contributors for deriving climatic indices data utilized in this study. Plotting time series of NDVI and climatic indices were performed from an integrated development environment for R programming language, RStudio.

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  1. Department of Oceanography and Hydrography, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Maritime University, Plot# 14/06-14/23, Pallabi Mirpur-12, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh

    Md Masud-Ul-Alam, Md. Ashif Imam Khan, S. M. Mustafizur Rahman & Syed Shoeb Mahmud

  2. Department of Oceanography, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet, 3114, Bangladesh

    Subrata Sarker

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  1. Md Masud-Ul-Alam
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Contributions

Md Masud-Ul-Alam: Conceptualization, data retrieving and methodology development, draft writing, graphical analysis and visualization, and review. Subrata Sarker and Md. Ashif Imam Khan: Writing, editing, analysis, visualization, and reviewing the manuscript. S. M. Mustafizur Rahman and Syed Shoeb Mahmud: Editing, reviewing, and collecting revenue data from Department of Forest in Bangladesh.

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Correspondence to Md Masud-Ul-Alam.

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Masud-Ul-Alam, M., Sarker, S., Khan, M.A.I. et al. The Decadal Response of Vegetation in the Sundarbans Mangrove Forest to the Climate Variabilities: Observing from the Space. Remote Sens Earth Syst Sci 4, 141–157 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41976-021-00055-0

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