Urban Growth and Land Use/land Cover Change of Pokhara Sub-metropolitan City, Nepal

Urban development has enlarged the modification of natural resources and has changed land use and land cover patterns. Urbanization is a process of increase of modernization system which modifies the socioeconomic activities and revolutionizes the land use practice according to time frame. Due to the proximate and underlying causes, land use and land cover change has become the main challenge of the present world. Due to the huge course of urbanization, the major cities of the world are compelled to face the severe threats. Various causes of the urbanization process bring the unrestrained impact on land use and land cover change. An unplanned urbanization process is becoming the major problem in the developed and developing countries. Population growth, migration, political instability, economic opportunities, centralized plans and policies of the government, accessibility of physical infrastructure, globalization are some of the major causes of the high level of urbanization in Nepal. This paper presents the historical urban growth phenomenon and analysis of land use and land cover change of Pokhara sub-metropolitan by utilizing remote sensing imagery and GIS. In the study, Markov chain model has been used to predict future changes based on the rate of past change in IDRISI GIS. The landsat images of 1977 MSS, 1990 TM, 1999 ETM+ and 2010 TM are rectified and registered in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) zone 44N. Supervised classification system has been used to classify the images of different land use categories. Six land use classes have been identified: Urban (Built-up), water body, open field, forest cover, cultivated land and sandy area. Urban land use change for the year 2021 was modeled using a Markov chain based approach. For the projection of 2021, transitional probability matrix table from the land use land cover map of 1999 and simulated map of 2010 is derived. Projected land cover changes show a growing tendency in urban land use, which might threaten the areas that are currently reserved for forest and agricultural lands.