Unplanned urbanization, demographic and environmental changes have forced many cities into more uncertainty and risk, challenging economic, social, and environmental sustainability. In this context nurturing resilience in the face of various uncertainties of environmental, socioeconomic and other sociopolitical risk is an urgent matter. Resilience has become an important goal for many cities throughout the world leading to the enhancement of urban ecology and maintenance of essential ecosystem goods and services to make sure the sustainable future for all. The Kathmandu metropolitan city is one of the fastestgrowing capital cities with recent and frequent evidence of unplanned development, loss of green space, tragic events of an earthquake, flood and other environmental problems causing devastation, economic damages, and loss of human life/health, and habitats. In this background, the paper evaluates suitable sites for urban green space development using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) based multi-criteria analysis methods with geographical information system (GIS).Variables taken for this study are school point data, health facility's location data, emergency service's locations, water bodies, emergency road network data, recent land use/land cover data, population data, existing park, and slope. The unit of a study is a metropolitan city. Our evaluations demonstrate the spatial distribution of different not suitable areas, less suitable, moderate suitable, and highly suitable area respectively, of the 4.47%, 7.19% of the area are high and moderate suitable area, while the largest area 78.87% is less suitable and 9.47% are not suitable for the development of green open space. The result indicates human occupancy is everywhere and per capita, open green space in the city is very below the global average. The local government must think about different modality for development of green open space in collaboration with other government agency occupying more open space or engagement with private sectors. This finding could contribute a planner for spatial planning of green space development in a Metropolitan City.
Forests provide numerous ecosystem goods and services. Their roles are considered as important for both climate mitigation and adaptation program. In Nepal, there are significant forest resources which are distributed in different regions; however, the studies on the spatial tree species distribution and the above-ground biomass and their relationship at the landscape level have not been well studied. This study aims to analyze the relationship, distribution of tree species diversity, and above-ground biomass at a landscape level. The data used for this study were obtained from the Forest Research and Training Center of Nepal, International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), and Worldwide Wildlife Fund (WWF-Nepal). The landscape has a mean of 191.89 tons ha−1 of the above-ground biomass. The highest amount of the above-ground biomass measured was 650 tons ha−1 with 96 individual trees, and the least was 3.428 tons ha−1. The measured mean height of the tree was 11.77 m, and diameter at breast height (DBH) was 18.59 cm. In the case of the spatial distribution of the above-ground biomass, plots distributed at the middle altitude range greater than 900 meters above sea level (m. a. s. l) to 3000 meters above sea level taking more amount of the above-ground biomass (AGB). Similarly, the highest plot-level Shannon diversity index (H’) was 2.75 with an average of 0.96 at the middle altitude region followed by the lower region with an average of 0.89 and least 0.87 at a higher elevation. Above-ground biomass (R2 = 0.48) and tree height (R2 = 0.506) significantly increased with increasing elevation up to a certain level increased of elevation. Diameter at breast height (DBH) showed significance (R2 = 0.364) but small increase with increasing elevation, while the relationship among tree species diversity index, above-ground biomass, and elevation showed a weak and very weak positive relationship with R2 = 0.018 and R2 = 0.002, respectively. Based on the overall results, it is concluded that elevation has some level of influence on the forest tree diversity and above-ground biomass. The finding of this study could be useful for landscape-level resource management and planning under various changes.
Green space refers to land areas covered primarily with vegetation, including parks, gardens, nature reserves, and other similar areas. These spaces offer various benefits such as supporting biodiversity, enhancing air and water quality, promoting mental and physical well-being, providing opportunities for recreation and social interaction, and improving the overall beauty of the environment. To assess the dynamics of green space in Pokhara Metropolitan City (PMC), maximum likelihood classification and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) methods were utilized to analyze satellite imagery. The study showed two distinct patterns of urban green space, with the green space in the central city gradually decreasing, while the nearby suburban and remote areas of PMC experienced an increase as agricultural land was transformed into grassland due to population migration. Consequently, the area of moderately healthy vegetation increased, while healthy vegetation decreased from 4926 hectares (10.61% of total area) to 2535 hectares (5.46% of total area). Additionally, the area of no vegetation such as urban areas increased from 1.8% to 2.17%. An accuracy assessment was used to validate the analyzed data, resulting in an overall accuracy of 81.91% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.63. The primary factors contributing to the loss of green spaces were urban growth and population growth within the inner metropolis. Therefore, it is crucial to maintain PMC's green areas and give more attention to this issue while developing municipal plans and policies in the future.
Conservation areas are originally well-known for protecting landscape features and wildlife. They are playing key role in conserving and providing a wide range of ecosystem services, social, economic and cultural benefits as well as vital places for climate mitigation and adaptation. We have analyzed decadal changes in land cover and status of vegetation cover in the conservation area using both national level available data on land use land cover (LULC) changes (1990-2010) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) (2010-2018) in Annapurna conservation area. LULC showed the barren land as the most dominant land cover types in all three different time series 1990, 2000 and 2010 with followed by snow cover, grassland, forest, agriculture and water body. The highest NDVI values were observed at Southern, Southwestern and Southeastern part of conservation area consisting of forest area, shrub land and grassland while toward low to negative in the upper middle to the Northern part of the conservation area.
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