Spatiotemporal Analysis of Urban Expansion in the Mountainous Hindu Kush Himalayas Region

As a major human activity, urbanization exerts strong impact on the fragile ecosystem in Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) region. To maintain sustainable development, reliable data urban land change are required to assess of urbanization. Here, reliability evaluation four global fine-resolution impervious surface area (ISA) products: annual (GAIA), dynamics (GAUD), (GISA), and expansion (GUE) was carried out. The characteristics for five representative cities including Kabul, Lhasa, Lijiang, Thimphu, Xining were remarkably different. Based results incremental analysis spatial difference ISA, it found that GAIA dataset at 30-m resolution could provide better ISA information than others characterizing mountainous Subsequently, changes analyzed using from 1993 2018. In general, settlements had grown, with transformation small villages into larger towns some cities. Urban would continuously intensify contradictions between activity sustainability exert more significant HKH More attention should be paid ecosystem.