An Assessment of Climate and Land Cover Changes at Local Level: A case study of Rautahat District, Nepal

This study was carried out in Rautahat District to assess climate and land cover changes at the local level. The main objective was to assess changes in land cover and climatic variables in the Churia and Terai regions of Nepal. The major indicators selected for this study were land cover, temperature, rainfall, river flow, flood, drought and fire. Landsat images of 1989 and 2017, MODIS (Terra and Aqua) and VIIRS fire locations data from 2002 to 2018, CHIRPS rainfall data form 1981 to 2017, MOD11A2 V6 temperature data from 2001 to 2016 and Bagmati river discharges at Pandhere Dovan from1988 to 2015 were used for this study.  Similarly, for drought analysis meteorological data from Simara was used. Supervised image classification method was applied to classify Landsat images into forest, agriculture, settlement, bare land and water cover using maximum likelihood algorithm in ERDAS Imagine and changes in land covers were analyzed in ArcGIS. Temperature and rainfall data were extracted from Google Earth Engine and their time series responses were plotted. Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was analyzed for drought.  Results show that forest area in the district has increased by 8%. Annual rainfall has increased by 3 mm per year and temperature has increased by 0.06^oC. Fire incidence has increased by one incidence per year. The year 2012 was extreme drought year having -2.54 SPI value. Similarly, The Bagmati and Bakaiya river beds have expanded by 2.5% per year. The annual water flow in Bagmati River has decreased by 1.84 m³/s per year.