The use of MCDA in forest health risk assessment for an effective geoenvironmental management of Divjake Karavasta National Park

Abstract

Forest health refers to the overall ecological and functional condition of a forest, which affects its ability to support biodiversity, regulate the climate and provide natural resources for people and the surrounding environment. Since healthy forests are essential for maintaining ecosystems and combating climate change, continuing monitoring of their health status is crucial for an effective geo-environmental management process. Therefore, identifying risk factors and providing adequate information on potential problematic areas becomes an important task for protected areas managers at local and national level. This requires finding and obtaining a large amount of data from different sources and methods, a situation that can become complex in terms of spatial decision making because all the contributing factors need to be evaluated simultaneously. Nowadays, with development of geo-information technology these difficulties can be easily overcome by using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques. In this study, the adaptation of GIS/RS-based MCDA techniques in Divjake-Karavasta National Park is examined and explained. A set of satellite images from SN32-Satellite Nusat 32 (Albania 1)/SN33-Satellite Nusat 33 (Albania 2), year 2024 are used as main data source to analyze risk factors in forest health of the park. Important indices namely Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Green Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), Land Cover (LC) and Road infrastructure have been calculated in a GIS environment using ArcGIS Desktop 10.8.2/Pro 3.2. The spatial patterns that study reveals indicate that the majority of forest area in Divjake-Karavasta National Park resides in an adequate environment under supportive health factors.