Land Cover Change in Bamyan, Afghanistan from 1990 to 2015: Land Degradation and Lack of Land Management

Lack of management and years of conflict have resulted substantial stress over natural and seminatural ecosystem in Bamyan, Afghanistan. In this study, we evaluated the spatio-temporal changes in land cover in Bamyan from 1990 to 2015 and lack of land management issues. To achieve the objective a comprehensive field work survey was conducted with 97 local people and farmars with a framed questionnaire. 88 local people and farmars stated that land cover has changed with 30 years. Both respondent groups specified the reasons as population increase, overuse of resources, overgrazing, shrub collection, drought and mismanagement. The result of interview with governmental organizations and NGOs demonstrated, land degradation is acute problem due to vegetation cover removal, overgrazing, dependency on natural resources, fodder collection and cultivations on steep slopes. Moreover, we applied the Maximum Likelihood Classification method to produce land-cover maps using Landsat images of 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2015. Defining grid cells with unique cell IDs allowed us to quantify spatio-temporal changes in land-cover classes. Rangeland decreased from 60.2% to 37.9%, accompanied by rapid increases in bare soil and built-up classes. This suggests the extension of anthropogenic influence into surrounding natural and semi-natural ecosystems. Statistical comparison of the land-cover changes in 0.81 km2 grid square cells showed that the decrease in rangeland was strongly negatively correlated with that of bare soil. Furthermore, around Bamyan city, the expansion of builtup areas was strongly positively correlated with that of plantation areas, and negatively correlated with bare soil increases. This is due to the rapid socio-economic changes between 1999 and 2015. The result indicates that years of conflict, absence of management, and socio-economic change caused land cover change in Bamyan between 1990 and 2015.