Trends of land cover change in a key biological corridor in Central Nepal

Abstract

Neupane K, Gautam AP, Regmi A. 2017. Trends of land cover change in a key biological corridor in Central Nepal. Asian J For 1: 50-55. The study analyzed the changes in land cover in one of the key biological corridors in Central Nepal called the Barandabhar Corridor located in Chitwan District, during the last two decades (i.e. 1991 to 2013). The study is based on analysis of satellite imageries (Landsat 5 TM of 1991 and Landsat 8 OLI_TIRS of 2013) and primary data on drivers of land cover change, collected from the field. Supervised Maximum Likelihood method of image classification was used to produce the land cover maps for 1991 and 2013. The result showed that forest cover in the corridor increased by 7.03% while the coverage of shrubland, water and other land cover types decreased during the study period. Implementation of community based forest management programs, low dependency on forest resources, and increase in conservation awareness among the local people are found to be the main causes behind the increase in forest cover.