Abstract
Abstract. Changes of agricultural land into non-agricultural land is the main issue of increasing population and urbanization. The objective of this paper is to identify the various land resources and its changes into other Land Use Land Cover (LULC) type. LANDSAT satellite data for 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2018 years of Kailali district Nepal was acquired for supervised LULC mapping and change analysis using ENVI 5.4 software. Sentinel-2 and Google earth satellite data were used for the accuracy assessment of the LULC map. The time-series data analysis from 1990–2000–2010–2018 shows major changes in vegetation and agriculture. The changes in LULC show that settlement and bare land is continuously increasing throughout these years. The change in land use and land cover during the period of 1990–2018 shows that the settlement area is increased by 204%; and agriculture is decreased by 57%. The fluctuating behavior of vegetation, agriculture and water bodies in which the areas decrease and increase over the selected periods is due to natural calamities and migration of the local population. This shows that human influence on the land resources is accelerating and leading to a deterioration of agricultural land. Thus effective agricultural management practices and policies should be carried out at the government level for minimizing land resources degradation by the human-induced impact.
Highlights
The land occupied by the population for their specific purposes such as farming, settlement can be defined as land use (FAO, 1976; Stomph et al.,1994); while the land cover is defined as the biophysical condition of the earth surface and its instant subsurface (Herold et al, 2003)
The rationale of the research lies in preparing the Land Use Land Cover (LULC) map and understanding spatiotemporal conditions through LULC analysis
As we compare the area between 2010 and 2018 we found a slightly decreasing trend in agricultural land
Summary
The land occupied by the population for their specific purposes such as farming, settlement can be defined as land use (FAO, 1976; Stomph et al.,1994); while the land cover is defined as the biophysical condition of the earth surface and its instant subsurface (Herold et al, 2003). Land use and land cover mapping and decadal change analysis depend upon the spatial and temporal level of analysis. The longterm phenomenon of land use and land cover change is not visible in a short time since the conversion of agriculture land into urban cannot be detected within 1 or 3 years of a time interval as it requires a long time interval gap and large scale data. The land use and land cover changes are strongly influenced by rapid urbanization (Dadras et al, 2015). Urbanization is affected by human influences, socioeconomic and physical factors which result in various consequences including deforestation, destruction of agricultural lands, and conversion of bare and fallow lands into human settlements (Dadras et al, 2015)
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