**3.2 Forest boundary**

The forest boundaries of Assam State were generated by digitizing the Survey of India Topomaps at 1:50,000 scale. According to the World Database on Protected Areas (www.protectedplanet.net) Assam State constitutes total 14 Protected Areas (PA), out of which 7 viz. Pabitora, Orang, Kaziranga, Manas, Sonai-Rupai, North Cachar and Barail, were analyzed in the present study. Theoretically no resource exploitation is allowed in PA's of categories I and II (IUCN, 1994). For further analysis, boundary pixels were excluded to avoid the contamination error.
