Spatio-Temporal Distribution of Invasive Species (Prosopis juliflora, Arundo donax) in Kundian Irrigated Plantation, Mianwali
Spatio-Temporal Distribution of Invasive Species (Prosopis juliflora, Arundo donax) in Kundian Irrigated Plantation, Mianwali
Hareem Fatima1, Lubna Ansari1*, Sajjad Haider Zaidi2, Shazia3, Saqib Mehmood4 and Nasim Iqbal Butt5
ABSTRACT
Invasive alien species are the species that are not native to the certain ecosystem and have adverse effect on the native plant species. Prosopis juliflora and Arundo donax are invasive plants in Kundian irrigated plantation and produce competition for native plants. There was no research on drivers of Invasive species (Prosopis juliflora and Arundo donax) and current and temporal spread of these species spread in the study area. The main objective of this study is to access time wise distribution of these species (10 years) and current distribution in the study area. This research also intends to identify the main drivers of invasive species (Prosopis juliflora, Arundo donax) in the study area. To map spatio temporal distribution of selected invasive species Random forest (RF) classification on Landsat 8 images 2014, 2019, 2023 for temporal and 2024 for current distribution was done. Total 7 Land use land cover classes were identified by classification which include water body, crop land, other vegetation, built up, bare land, Prosopis juliflora and Arundo donax. Drivers of invasive species (Prosopis juliflora, Arundo donax) are identified through a questionnaire and analyzed in SPSS. RF was successful to classify current distribution (2024) of Prosopis juliflora and Arundo donax with Kappa statistics of 0.79 and temporal distribution of these species have Kappa statistics value of 0.78, 0.70, 0.71 and overall accuracy of 81.81%, 74.5%, 75% and 82.5% for the years 2014, 2019, 2023 and 2024. It was noted that Prosopis juliflora increased from 1927.13 ha to 3337.92 ha and current distribution shows that it is still increasing and Arundo donax increased from 645.95 ha to 1639.87 ha and current distribution shows that now Arundo donax is decreasing (1424.10 ha). Main driver which was indicated for spread of selected species is anthropogenic activities. Results obtained by this study would help to identify the area covered by these species and can safe native plants, water resources and cropland.
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