ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Predictive Species Habitat Distribution Modelling
of Indian Sandalwood Tree Using GIS
Nambi Manavalan Rajan1, Shanmugam Jayalakshmi2
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1Institute of Remote Sensing, Department of Civil Engineering, Anna University Chennai,
Tamil Nadu, India
2Institute of Remote Sensing, Department of Civil Engineering, Anna University Chennai,
Tamil Nadu, India
Submission date: 2016-11-25
Final revision date: 2017-01-19
Acceptance date: 2017-02-08
Online publication date: 2017-06-19
Publication date: 2017-07-25
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2017;26(4):1627-1642
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ABSTRACT
The Indian sandalwood tree is a highly valuable aromatic wood resource. But its population is declining at an alarming rate that cannot be controlled through manually employed management techniques. Also, the limitations of the automated management techniques in practice, such as the drawbacks of models like MAXENT, GARP, etc., can dealt with the usage of the techniques used in this research. ‘Strategy-oriented prescriptive process modelling’ has been employed in this research so that the management techniques are brought under automation for quicker processing of algorithms. The outcome of this research is a toolbox that contains the ‘machine-learned algorithms’ for performing ecological niche modelling of Santalum album for any given study area, ensuring that all the necessary data (concerned with the study area) are fed as inputs so that the final site suitability map is obtained as the output. The results have been well-discussed in the form of tables in this manuscript. Upon validation (through ground truthing) of the final output we observed that the toolbox designed in this research is able to give 90.625% accuracy in the resulting maps it produces.