Geomorphic determinanats of landuse intensity

Abstract. Increasing population growth and lacking of further spatial expansion of various landuse have compelled to look intensity dimension of landuse. Grid cell based data extraction can give unique character of each locality of small land unit area which is very suitable technique for data extraction in the hill areas like Nepal. Landform plays an important role determining landuse intensity. Freely available 30m resolution Aster GDEM image has been used to extract geomorphic variables. Landuse data has been taken from aerial photo 1996. Quantitative weight has been given to landuse categories on the basis input, output and ecological importance for human life. One hectare square grid cells have been generated to extract geomorphic and landuse intensity information. The result shows that the average intensity of landuse is highly related to summarized categories of each geomorphic variable. Graphical presentation and quantitative analysis have been used to identify the effect of geomorphic variables on land use intensity. Simple and multiple correlation and regression analysis shows that there is higher control of altitude, slope gradient and slope aspect on landuse intensity. The average landuse intensity is highly determined by geomorphic variable then in local level. Multiple correlation coefficients is found to be 0.42 and the adjusted R² representing coefficient of determination is 0.178 which is significant at more than 99 % of confidence level. So, it can be concluded that geomorphic factors have contributed 17.8 % of the total variation determining landuse intensity in the study area.