National Land Cover Monitoring System of Nepal

national land covering monitoring system
The NLCMS provides easy access to the harmonized land cover database for the entire country, different administrative units, or physiographic zones for the years 2000–2019.

EXPLORE APPLICATION

Nepal’s National Land Cover Monitoring System (NLCMS) was developed by the Forest Research and Training Centre (FRTC) with technical support from SERVIR-HKH, a joint initiative of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). Collaborators include SERVIR–Mekong at the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC), SilvaCarbon, Global Land Analysis, and Discovery (GLAD) group at the University of Maryland, and the US Forest Service.

The NLCMS uses freely available remote-sensing data (Landsat) and a cloud-based machine learning architecture in the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform to generate land cover maps on an annual basis using a harmonized and consistent classification system. The system was further customized from ICIMOD’s Regional Land Cover Monitoring System (RLCMS) for Nepal. The NLCMS generates spatially seamless and temporally consistent annual land cover maps of the entire country and will be useful for national and international reporting on forest cover change, preparing a long-term strategy for achieving Nepal’s Nationally Determined Contribution targets, and as a foundational dataset for evidence-based planning and policy development.

Data visualization

The web-based application provides easy access to the harmonized land cover database for the entire country, different administrative units, or physiographic zones for the years 2000–2019. It provides user-friendly tools to generate maps, charts, and statistics that help understand the change processes better and aid informed decision-making.

Users can generate land cover data, maps, and trends for predefined administrative boundaries – seven provinces or 77 districts, or physiographic zones – High Himalaya, High Mountain, Siwalik, Middle Mountain, and Terai.

Users can also draw a polygon to compute land cover data for an area of interest (AOI).

Feedback

We value your feedback. Please write to servirhkh@icimod.org  and info@frtc.gov.np.