Identification of land reclamation area and potential plantation area on Bagmati river-basin in the Terai region of Nepal

Abstract

Utilization of land reclamation area offers the potentiality of increasing greenery as well as providing forest products. This study refers to the identification of the land reclamation areas and potential plantation areas on the Bagmati river-basin in the Terai region of Nepal, and recommends appropriate species for plantation in order to rehabilitate such areas. Multi-temporal Landsat Satellite Images (Landsat 7 and Landsat 8) were acquired for 2002 and 2014. Object-based Image Classification method was used to classify the land cover classes into four broad categories: i) Water, ii) Sand and gravel, iii) Plantation potential (open areas suitable for plantation) and iii) Others (forest, agriculture, built-up areas etc.). The Mean Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) values and Mean Brightness values were found to be helpful in identifying the water and sand & gravel areas from the other land cover classes. The overall classification accuracy was 0.97 with a kappa coefficient of 0.89 in the case of the 2014 Image classification. In this study, the land reclamation area referred to the areas occupied by water, sand & gravel on the river-beds that were converted into plantation potential and other classes between 2002 and 2014. Similarly, the potential plantation area referred to the summation of the area of reclaimed land, the area of ‘Others’ class converted into ‘Plantation potential’ class and the area that remained to be plantation potential on the bed of the Bagmati River and its tributaries between 2002 and 2014. Altogether, 4,819.10 ha land was reclaimed in the study area, and a total of 5,395.10 ha land was found to be potential for plantation within the study area.Banko JanakariA Journal of Forestry Information for NepalVol. 26, No. 1, Page:53-59, 2016