ESA - Eduspace EN - Global Change - Landscape units of Nepal

25-Apr-2025

Coastal change

Danube Delta change detection Oil spills

Deforestation

Bardia National Park Congo River Basin Kameng-Sonitpur Elephant Reserve Kilimanjaro Rondonia Shillong and Guwahati

Ice

Antarctica 2003 Climate change and glaciers Glacier analysis using radar imagery Glacial retreat in the Alps Glacier Ice Flow Monitoring of glaciers in the Himalayas Remote sensing of ice and snow

Urbanisation

Cairo City of Kathmandu Córdoba Himalayas Kathmandu Valley Lagos

Vegetation

Annapurna Conservation Area Lost in the Andes Ngorongoro Conservation Area Niger Inland Delta Vegetation in South America

Landscape units of Nepal

This exercise requires the use of LEOWorks.

In this first exercise we will learn more about the study area and its geographical features.Download the necessary data from Himalayas_env1.zip.

Open LEOWorks and open the image himalaya.tif from your work directory. This image is a mosaic of several Landsat scenes, and shows the full extension of the Himalayan mountain range in Nepal. It has a spatial resolution of 456 m.

From a satellite image it is often quite difficult to see national boundaries between different countries. In the LEOWorks main toolbar, click on the GIS button and the GIS-tool window will appear. Click File>Open Theme and select the file Nepal_boundary.shp. The program will ask you to select a transformation method. Select the following options:
- Transformation Method: Arbitrary
- Load mode: Map Based

You will now see that the boundary is overlaid on the satellite image.
You may use the GIS Tool from the image window: Edit>Properties, in order to change the colour of the polygon and its size.
As you already learned in the background chapters, Nepal can be divided into several landscape units. See the map below which shows the spatial distribution of the landscape units:

Terai - lowland plain
Siwalik – southern hills
Middle Mountain – central shallow hill zone
High Mountain – steep mountainous zone
Himalaya – high elevation zone

Landscape units of Nepal

1. Carefully inspect the image with respect to colour and topography, and identify the 5 landscape units as described above.

2. Use the Annotation tool in LEOWorks to indicate them by entering the 5 terms in the right position.

3. Describe each of the 5 landscape units with respect to the apparent colour in the satellite image, the topography, and the land cover, resp. the land use.

Go to the internet, for example Google Earth, and find, for each unit, a photograph showing the landscape and perhaps also the people living there.

4. Summarise your findings in a table as the one shown below.

Landscape Unit	Colours in the image	Description of topography	Land cover/ Land use	Photograph(s)
Terai
Siwalik
Middle mountain
High mountain
Himalaya

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Himalayas

Environmental problems in the Himalayas Urbanisation The Himalayan region Mountain ecosystems Nepal area Tibet area

Exercises

Himalaya - Worksheet Urbanisation – 40 years of urban development of Lhasa Urbanisation – Detection by means of delineation of the city perimeter Landslide detection in Langtang Himal

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