Environmental sensing-based assessment of trees outside forests and land use and land cover change patterns in the Bundelkhand agroforestry landscape

This study assesses land use and land cover (LULC) dynamics and Trees Outside Forests (TOF) in Lalitpur district, Uttar Pradesh, within the semi-arid Bundelkhand landscape. The study addresses the need to distinguish tree resources occurring outside officially defined forest areas from conventional LULC classes and to examine their spatial significance for land management. Landsat imagery was used to produce LULC maps for 2015, 2020 and 2025 using supervised Maximum Likelihood Classification (MLC), while high-resolution canopy-height data were used to derive total tree cover. A one-hectare circular neighbourhood and a 10% canopy-density threshold were then used to identify forest areas according to the operational framework applied from the Forest Survey of India (FSI), and TOF was estimated as tree cover outside that forest mask. The reported LULC results show an increase in agricultural area from 2,351.29 km² (47%) excluding the drought fallow land (1440 sq km) in 2015 to 3,776.26 km² (74%) in 2020, followed by 3,704.66 km² (72%) in 2025, while open forest declined from 1,383.43 km² (27%) to 417.97 km² (8%). The Forest & tree-cover assessment estimated 203,969 ha (40.34%) of tree cover, of which 63,697 ha (12.60%) met the applied forest-density criterion and 140,272 ha (27.74%) were classified as TOF. These findings indicate that a substantial share of mapped tree cover occurs outside the FSI-defined forest category. The combined LULC and TOF framework provides a spatial basis for agroforestry planning and sustainable land management, while the limitations of MLC, the canopy-height threshold, and the available validation information should be considered when interpreting the estimates.