Interactions between freshwater ecosystem services and land cover changes in southern Bangladesh: A perspective from short-term (seasonal) and long-term (1973–2014) scale

Future Impact of Land Use/Land Cover Changes on Ecosystem Services in the Lower Meghna River Estuary, Bangladesh

“…The land cover classification in this study followed four steps: i) identification of potential land cover types based on a critical literature review of previous studies and reports of governmental departments [8,11,15,17,19,29]; ii) creating a training file by SCP; iii) administration-maximum likelihood classification algorithm with the training file; and iv) post-processing of the classified…”

“…The land cover classification in this study followed four steps: (i) identification of potential land cover types based on a critical literature review of previous studies and reports of governmental departments [8,11,15,17,19,29]; (ii) creating a training file by SCP; (iii) administration-maximum likelihood classification algorithm with the training file; and (iv) post-processing of the classified images to avoid misclassification of land cover types, with the support of personal knowledge and review of previous LULC analysis on the study area, historical records from Google Earth, and application of sieve and edit classification functions in SCP of QGIS [28]. In this study, all the initial (micro) land categories were further reclassified into six broad (macro) categories ( Table 1).…”

“…A significant challenge in quantifying ESVs is that ecosystems provide many services in the form of public goods, and it is difficult to quantify their economic value as marketable goods [8]. To this end, Costanza et al [9] roughly calculated global ESVs through developing value coefficients for various land biomes, a pioneering approach that has received widespread attention from global research scholars.…”

“…Hence, as a result of rapid economic activity along with high population pressure and environmental degradation, LULC in Bangladesh has changed very rapidly [15,16]. Empirical investigations [8,14,15,[19][20][21][22][23] have shown that along with factors like rapid population growth and economic development, land degradation, and sea-level rise are some of the other driving forces in the coastal region of Bangladesh that have led to rapid LULC transformations over different periods, and that these have been arguably more widespread and intense than in any other areas of the globe, and that these conditions continue to worsen, leading to ongoing degradation and damages in the ecological value of these vulnerable environments [8,20,23].…”

“…Over the decades, rapid LULC alterations have threatened the land management sustainability and imbalances the socio-environmental systems of this region [19,20,23]. However, insufficient work has been done in detecting future LULC changes in this vulnerable zone [8,14,15,19,21,22,24,25] and evaluating their impacts on the ESs [23]. Therefore, it is imperative to examine the dynamics of LULC transformation for various future land management scenarios and their effects on ESs in order for ecological restoration of the landscape [23].…”