Assessing forest cover sustainability and deforestation risk from socioeconomic and biophysical indicators – a case study from Rampa Forests, south India

Assessing socio‐economic and biophysical constraints on the deforestation process gains importance in the context of increasing pressure on tropical forests. In this study, we quantify forest change ‘hotspots’, defined as the areas where land cover changes are likely to occur in the near future, by utilizing land use/cover data, in conjunction with socio‐economic and biophysical indicators, from one of the tropical forests of south India. We assessed deforestation risk as a function of density of shifting cultivation, density of agricultural area to total area, land availability for agricultural purposes, demand of endosomatic energy and the applied power to forest ecosystem. Results suggested that, due to relatively high demand for resources and high percentage of agricultural labourers, one of the provinces had high risk of forest loss. The indicators selected were useful in addressing deforestation in the study area and have potential to establish sustainable forest management models elsewhere.