Spatio-temporal changes of forest and other land covers in the North-eastern Part (Jamalpur & Sherpur) of Bangladesh

Being a developing country Bangladesh is facing a rapid land use and land cover (LULC) change in recent few decades. The study was conducted to quantify the LULC change in the north-eastern part of Bangladesh for one decade. Landsat imageries of the study area for 2010 and 2020 were downloaded from the USGS earth explorer. The images were processed using QGIS and ArcGIS soft wares. A supervised semi-auto classification technique was applied to classify the study area into five land cover classes, i.e., forest, water, agri/homestead, fallow and built-up. Overall classification accuracies were 88% and 90% for the images of 2010 and 2020, respectively. During the studied decade, the coverage of built-up and agri/homestead showing an increasing trend in exchange of forest, water, and fallow lands which showed a decreasing trend. In one-decade period built-up area increased by 54.32% and agri/homestead area increased by 2.83%. On the other hand, fallow land decreased 50.6%. During the studied timeframe from 2010 to 2020, about 27033.75ha of forest area and 10799.19ha of fallow land area were converted to agri/homestead. However, about 3307.14ha and 5046.06ha of agri/homestead area was converted to fallow and built-up, respectively. About 312.92ha, 331.29ha and 278.1ha of forest area in 2010 was converted to water, fallow and built-up area, respectively in 2020. Different causes reported are mainly over-exploitation, illegal logging, making settlements and housing for increased population, urbanization etc. published by the Journal of Biodiversity and Environmental Sciences | JBES