Abstract
Nepal, located in a unique transition zone spanning from plains to mountains and then to the plateau, is characterized by diverse and complex land cover. Based on an object-oriented method and decision tree classifier, a land cover product covering the whole of Nepal in 2010 (hereinafter referred to as the NepalCover-2010) was produced using 30 m-resolution Landsat TM images, consisting of 8 classes at Level I and 31 classes at Level II. The accuracy of the NepalCover-2010 product at Level II was validated using samples collected from high-resolution Google Earth images. The result showed that the overall accuracy of the product was 87.17%, with a Kappa coefficient of 0.85, making it the most accurate product among similar land cover products. The product can accurately reflect the spatial patterns of land cover in Nepal. Forests are the main land cover classes, accounting for 41% of the land, followed by croplands covering about 25%. The areal proportion of paddy fields to dry farmlands was approximately two to three. Topographical and meteorological factors presented as the determining effects on the spatial patterns of land cover in Nepal. With elevation uplift from south to north, land cover classes showed a vertical zonality ordered thus: paddy fields, evergreen broadleaf forests, dry farmlands, evergreen broadleaf shrubs, evergreen needleleaf forests, grasslands, sparse vegetation, and permanent ice/snow. Land cover mapping in Nepal contributes significantly to the basic data collection in this country, and can also be of a benefit to China’s international regional economic cooperation strategy entitled “the Belt and Road Initiative”.
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The First Law of Geography, according to Tobler (1970), is “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”, which is the foundation of the fundamental concepts of spatial dependence and spatial autocorrelation.
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Acknowledgements
This research was funded jointly by the International Cooperation Key Project of CAS (No.GJHZ201320), the International Cooperation Partner Program of Innovative Team of CAS (No.KZZD-EW-TZ-06), the Natural Science Foundation of China (No.41631180), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No.2016YFA0600103, 2016YFC0500201-06). We are also thankful to Zhengjian Zhang, Xi Nan, Jianbo Tan, Dong Yan, Han Xie, Shuaiqi Zhang, Yongshuai Yang, Mingjiang Sun, Li He, Pan Huang, Jie Peng, Hanxiao Zhong, Xinyao Xie, and Xiaorong Zhang for their contributions on data processing and land cover mapping. We are also grateful to researchers from Nepal TU for their work on field investigation.
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Lei, G. et al. (2017). Land Cover Mapping and Its Spatial Pattern Analysis in Nepal. In: Li, A., Deng, W., Zhao, W. (eds) Land Cover Change and Its Eco-environmental Responses in Nepal. Springer Geography. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2890-8_2
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