Impact of rehabilitation and status area change on land cover and carbon storage in paliyan wildlife reserve, gunung Kidul, Indonesia

This study analyzed the land cover change and carbon storage after the rehabilitation of Paliyan forest. This study mainly focused on the forest status during 1999-2019, especially after establishing a wildlife reserve forest and after rehabilitation activity. We used a combination of canopy density model, carbon conversion, and changes of management-related data to analyze land cover classes in two decades of 1999-2009 and 2009-2019 representing the change in status of the area, rehabilitation, and management dynamics through the time. The result shows that at baseline (1999), the status was still production plantation forest dominated by non-forest/open land with the most carbon storage in plantation forest of 5463.04 tons of carbon. In the first decade, important events occurred such as continuing illegal logging until 2001; change of area status to wildlife reserve forest; and initiation of rehabilitation in 2003. There was an increase in non-forest areas during the first decade, and carbon storage decreased mostly in plantation forests with only 867.71 tons of carbon remaining. In the second decade, rehabilitation has shown a positive impact in increasing forested areas, and altered non-forest to the forested area dominated by open forest/mixed agriculture area, followed by plantation forest, and secondary forest. In this decade, the legality of the area status and rehabilitation activity underwent to be more advance. The carbon storage also shows the positive result with the most increase of storage in plantation forest of 4072.932 tons carbon, or almost 4.7 times higher than that in 2009. Total carbon storage in 2019 was 13257.50 tons, or almost three times higher than that in 2009. The rehabilitation required a longer period to achieve a more dense forest condition as in 2019 the area was still dominated by open forest or agriculture. The smallholder farmers and high dependency of the surrounding community manage the land to feed their livestock, impede the rehabilitation and restoration process, and de-escalate the transition from non-forest to forest resulted in the more vegetated area. This result is important for stakeholders for designing appropriate forest-related policies and supporting further rehabilitation strategies. © 2021, Society for Indonesian Biodiversity. All rights reserved.