Regional Land Cover Mapping of the Hindu Kush-Himalayan Using Satellite Image: An Approach to Understand the Dynamics of Land Use and Land Cover Change

摘要

During the past few decades, mountain areas throughout the Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region havernexperienced rapid change. Expansion in education and health services, the development of roads andrnelectricity, improvements in irrigation and agricultural and related technologies, and the penetration ofrncommercial forces are drastically affecting land cover and ecosystems of many parts of the mountainrnareas. Each of these factors contributes with varying degree to the change dynamics of mountain areas.rnA contributory factor may be applicable in one area, but not in another. It is therefore important to studyrnand understand the dynamics of land use and land cover change and determine which factor contributesrnsignificantly in a specific area before proper land use planning can be done. This process, first, required arnstandard methodology to understand and explain the pattern of land cover of the region. With thisrnconcept, ICIMOD formulated and initiated a project for land cover mapping of the region in 1999. Arnmethodological study for the land cover mapping of the region has been carried out and developed. Thernmethodology, which is based on GIS and remote sensing (RS), has been tested for the land coverrnmapping of Bhutan and Nepal using IRS-WiFs data. The study mainly focused on how to generaternreliable and good training samples, those are spectrally homogenous and spatially significant, for thernaccurate classification of the image. The study also integrated other information, e.g. DEM (DigitalrnElevation Model), rainfall, and temperature, with the land cover map classified from the image for therndetailed forest type classification. Accuracy assessment of the result was done to validate thernmethodology and showed a satisfactory accuracy of 83 and 88 percent for Bhutan and Nepal,rnrespectively.