Context

A satellite-imagery based analysis by researchers at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark reveals that India may have lost close to 5.8 million full-grown trees in agricultural land from 2019 to 2022.

• The study, published this week in the journal Nature Sustainability.

Farmlands in India

• Farmland is the land used or suitable for farming. 
• Today, 56% of India is covered by farmland, the largest agricultural cover in the world, while 20% of the country is covered by forest vegetation.
  • The use of land for agriculture depends on soil type, irrigation facilities, and climate. 
  • In India, about 51.09% of the land is under cultivation, 21.81% under forest, and 3.92% under pasture.

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India’s Farmland Loses 5.8 Million Trees

• Analysis: The present analysis however focuses on Indian farmland and tracks individual trees, albeit only big ones, relying on maps from multiple ‘micro-satellites’, and machine learning analysis to estimate trends, beginning 2010.
• Key Findings- Vanishing Green: 
  • Researchers mapped 600 million farmland trees in 2010-11 
  • About 11% of those trees disappeared by 2018 
  • Between 2018 and 2022, another 5 million trees disappeared 
  • The analysis revealed that these trees were mature and quite old, and the high loss rate of mature trees in less than a decade is “unexpected”. 
  • Rise in paddy cultivation due to increased availability of borewell water led to this.
    • This was especially common in areas where new water supply systems were built. 
  • Little evidence to attribute this disappearance to climate change
    • Agroforestry plays a crucial role in climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, including sustaining livelihoods and protection of crops. 

• Affected Region: 
  • Telangana and Maharashtra: Disappearance of most trees were observed
  • Eastern Madhya Pradesh: The smaller hotspot 
  • Central India: Generally, this region faces the highest losses
• Challenges Faced: 
  • Overlook of Exact Tree Cover: About 56% of India is covered by farmland and 22% by forest. With the largest agricultural area in the world, changes in tree cover here, while critical, have been largely “overlooked”.
  • Specific to Particular Size: 
    • Researchers used satellite-imagery from RapidEye and PlanetScope – to estimate changes in tree number from 2010 to 2022. 
    • These satellites can “see” large trees, three to five meters apart, as individual trees. 
    • However, the FSI relies on data from the Sentinel satellite that has a coarser resolution of 10 metre – implying that they can tell apart blocks of trees but not individual ones.
• Inference Drawn:
  • No Overall Decline: This does not necessarily imply that India’s overall tree cover, or trees outside forest, is declining as the analysis was specific to only large trees above a certain size.
  • No Contradiction with India’s Forest Survey Report: The study, however, clarifies that the findings do not contradict official reports stating that India’s tree cover has increased in recent years because large plantations of trees were not considered for the study, especially due to their lack of contribution to biodiversity.
    • The Forest Survey of India (FSI) conducts regular surveys of tree cover – both inside and outside forests – but only publishes data on the changes in acreage and not individual trees. The latest FSI report says that India’s tree cover has increased in 2021 over 2019.

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