Two-decade Spatio-temporal Land Use and Cover Changes in District Shangla of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

Abstract

L and use land cover (LULC) has become one of the major issues in sustainable development and global environmental changes (Alam et al., 2019;Yirsaw et al., 2017). LULC describes the land environment associated with anthropogenic activities, planning for sustainable environmental, social, and economic development, and lack of land and land resources due to global climate change and population strength (Ashraf, 2020;Matin et al., 2019). Changes in land cover are affected by social and natural factors (Kweyu et al., 2020). Many studies showed that social, economic, and climate change significantly impact LULC and the ecosystem (Hao et al., 2019;Liu et al., 2019).Abstract | Changes in land use land cover (LULC) play a vital role in developing and sustainable management of natural resources. The northern mountains of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa-Pakistan are rich in biodiversity and provide fragmented and fragile ecosystem services while vulnerability to the rapid changes in LULC with irreversible impacts on ecosystems, especially in district Shangla. Real-time monitoring and assessment are essential to understand such changes in LULC. In the current study, spatio-temporal changes of LULC were obtained from MODIS (MCD12Q1) product from 2001-2018 to examine LULC in the district Shangla of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa-Pakistan. LULC types were classified into seven major classes: evergreen forest, savannas, grasslands, permanent wetlands, croplands, natural vegetation, and barren land. The result indicated that grasslands (17.04-12.84%) and cropland (34.73-18.12%) decreased significantly due to over population pressure coupled by natural hazards, while savannas (40.63-49.25%), permanent wetlands (0.03-0.07%), and natural vegetation (3.13-14.96%), were increased significantly as a result of the different internations for the conservations in the area. As a result, the development of LULC maps will play a vital role in sustainable management of LULC in northern Pakistan due to the lack of ground and reliable data towards the targets of sustainable development goals in the area.