Abstract
Land change is a cause and consequence of global environmental change. Land use and land cover have changed considerably due to increasing human activities and climate change, which has become the core issue of major international research projects. This study interprets land use and land cover status and the changes within the Koshi River Basin (KRB) using Landsat remote sensing (RS) image data, and employs logistic regression model to analyze the influence of natural and socioeconomic driving forces on major land cover changes. The results showed that the areas of built-up land, bare land and forest in KRB increased from 1990 to 2015, including the largest increases in forest and the highest growth rate in construction land. Areas of glacier, grassland, sparse vegetation, shrub land, cropland, and wetland all decreased over the study period. From the perspective of driving analysis, the role of human activities in land use and land cover change is significant than climate factors. Cropland expansion is the reclamation of cropland by farmers, mainly from early deforestation. However, labor force separation, geological disasters and drought are the main factors of cropland shrinkage. The increase of forest area in India and Nepal was attributed to the government’s forest protection policies, such as Nepal’s community forestry has achieved remarkable results. The expansion and contraction of grassland were both dominated by climatic factors. The probability of grassland expansion increases with temperature and precipitation, while the probability of grassland contraction decreases with temperature and precipitation.
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Acknowledgement
This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41761144081), Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (Grant No. 2019QZKK0603) and Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA20040201). We highly appreciate the editor and referees for their efforts and suggestions to improve this paper. We would like to thank Prof. Narendra Raj Khanal, Prof. Prem Sagar Chapagain and Prof. Pashupati Nepal from Central Department of Geography (CDG), Tribhuvan University (TU), Nepal for their support in this research, especially in the field investigation. We thank Mr. Sher Bahadur Gurung of CDG of TU, and Mr. Mohan Kumar Rai from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences for their help and support in the field.
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Xie, Fd., Wu, X., Liu, Ls. et al. Land use and land cover change within the Koshi River Basin of the central Himalayas since 1990. J. Mt. Sci. 18, 159–177 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5944-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11629-019-5944-3