Data/Software

We used imagery acquired by the Landsat series of satellites to identify and document changes in land use and land cover in the region. The Landsat series of satellites provides the longest continuous record of satellite based land observations of the Earth from 1972 till date. For this study we analyzed imagery from 1991, 2000, 2009, 2010, and 2011 acquired by Landsat 5 Satellite with the Thematic Mapper (TM) Sensor, bands 1-7 including thermal band 6, spectral range 0.45-2.35 μm (bands 1,2,3,4,5,7), 10.4-12.5 μm (band 6), pixel resolution 30 m (band 6= 120 m). We selected datasets with no cloud cover and from the same month i.e. early February to best assess change over decadal and yearly timescales. We selected two additional datasets from end March in 2009 and 2010 to assess change over very short timescales that might reflect local agricultural practices. The datasets used in the study were produced by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and were downloaded from the Earth Explorer website at http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/. The datasets had UTM map projections and WGS84 datum. Additional details of the datasets are listed in table 1 below.

Year	Landsat	Path	Row	Producer	Date of Acquisition (Year-Month-Date)
1991	Landsat 5	147	47	USGS	1991-02-01
2000	Landsat 5	147	47	USGS	2000-02-10
2009	Landsat 5	147	47	USGS	2009-02-02
2009	Landsat 5	147	47	USGS	2009-03-22
2010	Landsat 5	147	47	USGS	2010-02-05
2010	Landsat 5	147	47	USGS	2010-03-25
2011	Landsat 5	147	47	USGS	2011-02-08

Table 1. Landsat datasets used for qualitative and quantitative spatial analyses of the region in and around the Bhimashankar Wildlife Sanctuary.

Geographic Information Systems Software

All qualitative and quantitative spatial analyses including image processing and enhancement and image classification was carried out using open source Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) GIS software. The software is available for download at www.grass.fbk.eu for various operating systems and platforms.