Forest cover monitoring of Bara district (Nepal) using remote sensing and geographic information systems

Abstract

This study uses Landsat TM of 1989 and ETM+ of 1999 and 2005 imagery to evaluateforest cover dynamics during 1989-2005 in the Bara district of Nepal. The aim of thestudy was to analyse the extent and trend of forest cover dynamics, spatial pattern offorest and their driving forces. Forest cover change analysis was performed using objectorientedclassification approach applying a standard nearest neighbour algorithm to classifythe image in recognition. The overall classification accuracies were 85.71% and 88.23%for the year 1999 and 2005, respectively. Land cover maps were produced with sevenland cover categories and were further reclassified as forest and non-forest areas toanalyse the forest cover dynamics. Post-classification and time series analysis were carriedout to detect the changes. Spatial metrics were computed for detecting the spatial patternof forest. The classifications suggested that the amount of forest land had decreased by11.56% during 1989-2005. Spatial metrics revealed that forest area has been fragmentedand deforested with an annual rate of 0.72%. The overall result demonstrates that forestarea has experienced a significant shrinkage and mostly transferred into agricultural andbare land. Expected change for the year 2021 was projected using Markov Chain Analysis(MCA). The MCA result showed that forest area would decrease by 8.5% in the period of2005-2021.Key words: Forest cover dynamics; geographical information systems; landsat; remotesensing; spatial metricsDOI: 10.3126/banko.v20i1.3506Banko Janakari, Vol. 20, No. 1 pp.30-36