Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Land and Vegetation Cover in Cold Desert Region of the Ladakh Himalaya

Abstract

The Himalayan ecosystems have characteristics land and vegetation distribution pattern owing to its varied complexities in topography, seasonality, changing climate and socioeconomic interventions. The comprehensive mapping of land and vegetation cover in the Himalayas has always been a great challenge to the cartographers and remote sensing scientists. The focus of this chapter is to demonstrate a practical approach to map and understand land and vegetation cover distribution, and their dynamics over interval of three decades using earth observation data. The study provides an insight to characterize the vegetation pattern across an elevation gradient using geospatial techniques in a test site of Kargil district in the Ladakh Union Territory, India. Two set of images during August–November 1975 and 2005 were used in classification that provided high classification accuracy of >90% (overall, and 0.86 kappa), as per field correspondence. This spatial analysis has indicated that LULC demonstrated significant changes during 1975–2005. It was observed that the barren lands and the snow cover areas together contributed to nearly 80% of the total area in 1975, whereas in 2005, they contributed to nearly 60% area of the district. Variation in elevation range owing to distribution of the vegetation classes was realized for the eastern and western aspects. The separation of classes with a sharp boundary between two adjoining classes is absolutely impossible in nature. Therefore, some misclassification was noticed at the ecotone region between two spectrally similar classes such as agroforest-scrubs, scrubs-pastures. Another noticeable observation is the mapping of water body pixels in 2005 (58.88 Km²) in contrast to 1975, which may well be attributed to the low resolution (60 m) of satellite data used for 1975, and rise in the extent of water bodies such as alpine lakes, and more water flow through river channels owing to snow and glacier melting. The geospatial database integrated with field data plays an important role toward land and vegetation cover dynamics studies, useful for sustainable management.