Masterarbeit

Influence of intensified glacier melt on downstream vegetation patterns in Langtang Valley, Nepal

Samip Narayan Shrestha (02/2023-08/2023)

Betreuer: Carl Beierkuhnlein, Frank Weiser

High mountain glaciers are an important part of the cryosphere which provide important services to around 2 billion people. These glaciers are melting at an accelerated rate due to climate warming. The aim of this study was to establish a link between increased glacier melt and change in vegetation land cover patterns through analyzing the surface area of vegetation land cover and top transition probabilities between land cover classes in the Langtang Valley, Nepal. Annual land use land cover datasets from year 2000 to 2019 from ICIMOD and glacier volume change datasets from Hugonnet et al. (2021) obtained from WGMS were pre-processed and analyzed. The study found that, after removing decadal seasonality signal, the surface area of land cover classes significantly correlated with the predicted glacier volume change based on year 2000 in eight of the eleven land cover classes. Also, four of the top ten transition probabilities correlated with predicted glacier volume change based on year 2000 after removing the decadal seasonality. There is an acceleration of vegetation growth which may be attributed to increased glacier melt that accelerates the regional hydrology.