Tropical forest clearing owing to timber produce, agricultural and infrastructure development has been widely reported. Hence, studying forest cover dynamics is crucial for better forest management practices. Till date, many methods have been developed to analyze the forest cover dynamics from satellite data. One of the most important and accurate being forest canopy density mapping (FCD) using Forest Canopy Density Mapper, hereafter referred to as FCD-M, which was developed under ITTO Project based on Rikimaru's methodology. However, FCD-M was only commercially available and had specific data requirements as it was developed for Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data, which limited its scope for wider applications. This paper presents an open source platform for FCD mapping developed in R framework (FCD-R) based on Rikimaru's methodology. FCD-R is flexible enough to work on datasets other than Landsat, provided the information in the required wavelength regions for calculation of indices is available. FCD-R was applied on a part of the Central Himalayan region to study forest cover dynamics over a period of 15 years. FCD Maps for 2000 and 2016, along with change dynamics are presented in the following sections. © 2018 IEEE.