Abstract
BackgroundThe land use plays a crucial role for a particular watershed along with many other identified and accepted factors. Momentarily, land cover practices are unorganised in most river basins of Nepal. The study aims at land cover classification, mapping of the changes over the last 25 years, an assessment of the accuracy for land cover classification, consolidation of the people’s perception of the ongoing work, studying trends in the temperature and precipitation pattern in the last 30 years in the area composed by 4 watersheds of the districts of Kaski and Tanahun of Chitwan Annapurna Landscape region, Nepal.ResultsThis research depicted that the land cover practice is changing in the areas of study. In most of the cases, the share of open broadleaved forest is higher. In case of closed broadleaved forest, it has improved in the recent years. Chhabdi Khola and Guhe Khola watersheds show an increase in overall forest cover and decrease in percentage of agricultural lands. Overall, despite changing climate, rise of temperature and declining of rainfall pattern, the vegetation cover shows an increasing tendency which may have positive effects for the water availability in the Kaski and Tanahun regions.ConclusionsThe following research endeavoured to connect knowledge and people’s perception in order to understand the implications related to land use management and possibly to improve water availability for society. The investigation includes integrated land use changes, vegetation cover, climatic trends and potential of this knowledge implementation for local people, farmers, regional and national governing agencies.
Highlights
The land use plays a crucial role for a particular watershed along with many other identified and accepted factors
The final assessment of regional changes has been done in order to form the basis for understanding the relationship between water availability, vegetation cover and climate and to draw recommendation for enhancing water availability (Fig. 2)
Field observation was the basis of the study with a Global Positioning System (GPS) Garmin navigation device, used for collecting the ground truths primary data for verification
Summary
The land use plays a crucial role for a particular watershed along with many other identified and accepted factors. Land cover practices are unorganised in most river basins of Nepal. Land use planning plays an integral role in sustainable conservation and management of catchment’s specific resources (van Lier 1998). Catchment’s properties determine various sub-parameters that play an important role in the water budget within the catchment (Atkinson 2002). Studies of the land cover shift are valuable for analysis of the environmental impact of human activities, climate change and other forces (Singh 2011).
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