On land-use and land-cover changes over Lidder Valley in changing environment

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe have examined the land surface changes in the Lidder Valley of Kashmir in the context of socio-economy, climate and environmental aspect using geoscience technology. It was found that there are large-scale changes in agriculture, horticulture and built-up in the subject area. Records for horticulture, agriculture and built-up were generated from satellite data. A geodatabase of socio-economic data is examined and corelated with the land system changes. Furthermore, environmental driving factors like precipitation, temperature, snowfall and black carbon (BC) data were used to relate with the changes in LU/LC over the study area. This study reports decrease in agricultural area from 189.73 km2 in 1979 to 77.18 km2 in 2011 while the horticulture is increasing by 3 km2 annually from last three decades. With the increase of about 95% in horticulture, the concentration of BC has also increased. BC is showing a significant decadal increase of 10.5 mg/m2 which is mainly attributed to the biomass burning from horticulture waste. Rainfall, as well as snowfall over the study area, is decreasing by an amount of 2.95 and 15 mm per decade, respectively, and also their pattern is changing. These variations over the study area result in water scarcity forcing people to implement horticulture.