| Popis: |
Restoring degraded forest is essential if we are to reduce human pressure on natural ecosystems and their biodiversity. Forests were nationalized in 1957 in Nepal and as a consequence, forest cover declined from 45% in 1964 to just 29% in 1994. However, as its response, sectoral plans and policies, particularly introduction of community-based forest management programs since the 1980s and conservation activities resulted in large scale forest cover restoration. Here, we examined the forest cover change in the Gandaki River Basin (GRB), the catchment with the largest altitudinal variation (ranging from ± 93 to 8167 m) and environmental and ecological significance. To see how forests have changed since then, we analyzed snapshots of spatiotemporal, ecological and physiographic changes in forest cover, and forest type at decadal intervals from 1996 to 2016 using Landsat 5 and 8 satellite images. We observed an overall gain in forest cover of 207 km |
Full text from SpringerLink