Analyses of Land Use Land Cover Change Detection of the Ugam

Chatkal National Park, Uzbekistan

Mukhiddin Juliev

1,2 a

, Nozimjon Teshaev

, Gulnora Djalilova

, Inobat Agzamova

Giyosiddin Gulyamov

and Jasmina Gerts

Institute of Fundamental and Applied Research, “TIIAME” National Research University,

39, Kori Nioziy, Tashkent, 100000, Uzbekistan

Turin Polytechnic University in Tashkent, 17, Little Ring Road, Tashkent, 100095, Uzbekistan

“Tashkent Institute of Irrigation and Agricultural Mechanization Engineers” National Research University,

39, Kori Nioziy, Tashkent, 100000, Uzbekistan

National University of Uzbekistan named after Mirzo Ulugbek, 4 Str. University, Tashkent, 100174, Uzbekistan

Tashkent State Technical University, 2, University, Tashkent, 100095, Uzbekistan

Keywords: Land Use Land Cover, Ugam-Chatkal, Climate Change.

Abstract: The Ugam-Chatkal National Park was established in 1992 as a result of reorganization of Chatkol Biosphere

Reserve. Located in the southern Tien Shan Mountain range, in the Chatkal mountain system, it is the largest

natural reserve in Uzbekistan. The national park was created to protect unique ecosystems and endangered

animals. In this study, the national park land cover change during the years 2000-2020 and the change map

of precipitation in the corresponding years were created based on the satellite images. Land cover change was

calculated using the Maximum likelihood classification (MLC) supervised classification method. From the

change of the land cover, it can be determined that the amount of vegetation has increased in the last two

decades, and the snow cover has decreased on the contrary. It was also found that open land cover increased

in the south.

1 INTRODUCTION

According to (Costanza et al., 2014), natural

ecosystems offer a range of goods and services that

are necessary for human survival. Human activity,

particularly industry and urbanisation, has an impact

on natural ecosystems. As such, there is risk to

ecosystem services, which are benefits that humans

derive from ecosystems (Kremen, 2005). The history

of scientific study on ecosystem services dates back

to the late 1970s, but the first systematic assessment

of the world's ecosystem services was carried out in

1997 (Gomes et al., 2021). Many scientists are

working to build and promote a set of ecosystem

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8582-0352

https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2798-2816

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1003-4434

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3102-4289

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3365-1902

https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6222-1111

service categories gradually (Czúcz et al., 2018;

Gafurova et al., 2021).

The increase and decrease in the area of a

particular land use or land cover is called Land use

land cover changes (Tian et al., 2014). The term

“land-use” was used by people for the proper use of

land covers for self-sufficiency. LULC makes a

significant contribution to the study of the process of

urbanization, to the monitoring and understanding of

changes in the urban area, its intensity, direction and

impact. It provides valuable information for land use

management and sustainable urban planning (Kontgis

et al., 2014). GIS and Remote Sensing technologies

are widely used to assess the dynamics of spatial and

Juliev, M., Teshaev, N., Djalilova, G., Agzamova, I., Gulyamov, G. and Gerts, J.

Analyses of Land Use Land Cover Change Detection of the Ugam Chatkal National Park, Uzbekistan.

DOI: 10.5220/0014268400004738

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Research of Agricultural and Food Technologies (I-CRAFT 2024), pages 325-332

ISBN: 978-989-758-773-3; ISSN: 3051-7710

325

temporal changes of global LULC on a global scale

(Lambin & Geist, 2008).

Using Landsat and MODIS satellite imagery, Yin

et al. mapped forest land cover changes in Central

Asia for 2009–2011 (Didan, 2015). The dynamics of

expansion of irrigated cropland in the Kashkadarya

region of the Republic of Uzbekistan in 1972-2000

was calculated by Edlinger et al. Tashkent region has

very rich natural resources, in particular, the Ugam-

Chatkal National Park is the largest natural protection

area in Uzbekistan (Yin et al., 2017). The presence of

more than 2,200 plant species in the park and the

presence of large forest areas made the national park

a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016 (Oymatov et

al., 2023). Chukwudi et al. (Kumar et al., 2022;

MohanRajan et al., 2020; Harris et al., 2020) studied

the degree of variability and trends in annual rainfall

in southwest Nigeria, taking into account the specific

nature of rainfall and these data have implications for

predictive modeling and long-term climate

change/variability adaptation programs in the basin.

In this research, we mapped the National Park's land

use change dynamics, vegetation cover change

dynamics, and decadal precipitation change maps

using spatial data analysis. The objective of the article

is to study the impact of global climate change on the

ecological condition of the national park.

2 MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1 Study Area

Tashkent region borders the Republic of Kazakhstan

to the north and northwest, the Kyrgyz Republic to

the northeast, Namangan Region to the east, the

Republic of Tajikistan to the south, and Syrdarya

Region to the southwest. The area (without the area

of Tashkent city) is 15.3 thousand km². The

population (without the population of Tashkent city)

is more than 2.931 million people (2022) (Oymatov

et al., 2023). The climate is a typically continental

climate with mild wet winters and hot dry summers.

Chatkal National Park, with mountains and forests, is

located within Tashkent Region.

Figure 1: Location of Tashkent region.

2.2 Data Processing

Landsat-5 TM and Landsat 8 (OLI & TIRS) satellites

were selected using the Earth explorer platform to

download satellite images. Satellite images for the

time period 2000–2020 were selected in June,

allowing for up to 10 percent cloud cover (path 142,

row 41;). Landsat satellite imagery has a resolution

of 30x30 m with eight reflectance bands of 30 m, one

panchromatic band of 15 m, and two thermal bands

of 100 m. The downloaded raw data were processed

in ArcGIS 10.7.1 without atmospheric correction.

The remaining technical parameters of the satellite

can be seen in the table below.

2.3 Method

There are various geospatial software tools used by us

researchers at different stages in the precise study of

remote sensing. An example is the pre-processing,

classification, analysis, and prediction of LU/LC

changes using multispectral satellite imagery. Some

of them are: ENVI, ArcGIS, IDRISI, ERDAS

Imagine, Quantum GIS and Google Earth. Land cover

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change classification and understanding can also be

assessed using various remote sensing indices:

NDVI, NDWI, NDBI, SAVI etc. Indices calculated

using satellite images have demonstrated the ability

of GIS to systematically, reliably and spatially

comprehensively monitor greenness and

accumulation indices. Methodological workflow and

data analysis of scientific research in the figure below

(Fig. 2).

Figure 2: Methodological workflow and data analysis.

Several types of land cover were distinguished

based on the study area in ArcGIS 10.7 using satellite

images as a source of information. Image

classification was performed using the MLC

Supervised Classification method. The main reason

that the downloaded spatial data was taken in June is

that the vegetation index is close to the maximum

point, as well as the selection of a cloudless image.

As mentioned above, only four of the 8 bands - Red,

NIR, SWIR, and TIRS1 bands- are required for

LULC analysis (Fig. 5). Vegetation cover analysis is

calculated by NDVI; the formula is given below.

Index varies between -1 and 1. In this case, the larger

the value, the healthier or dense plant cover is

understood, and the negative value is not considered

vegetation (Fig. 3).

NDVI = (NIR-RED)/(NIR+RED),

where: NIR is the Near Infrared band of Landsat

sensor (band 4 for Landsat TM 5 and Landsat-5 TM;

band 5 for Landsat 8 OLI); and RED is the red band

of Landsat sensor (band 3 for Landsat TM 5 and

Landsat ETM+ 7; band 4 for Landsat 8 OLI).

The CRU TS has provided a collection of high-

resolution, monthly observations dating back to 1901

(Yin et al., 2017). This set consists of ten observed

and derived variables. Rainfall data from this

collection were analysed and mapped using software

(Fig. 7).

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The achieved results show that within 20 years the

LULC of the National Park changed significantly.

The obtained results can be used for monitoring

glaciers, determining the flood of glacial lakes,

estimating forest biomass, and preserving

biodiversity in the national park (Table 1).

Table 3: Results of LULC assessment in the National Park.

Classes Area (km

)

2000 2010 2020

Snow 3200.3 1513.96 587.019

Bare land 1686.68 2239.74 2273.74

Water 54.3852 73.8441 45.8622

Vegetation 1684.19 2798 3741.37

Significant changes in vegetation cover were

observed due to the melting of glaciers and snow.

Although there is an increase in NDVI, it can be seen

that there is a regular decrease in the highest density

of green vegetation (Fig. 4).

Analyses of Land Use Land Cover Change Detection of the Ugam Chatkal National Park, Uzbekistan

327

Figure 3: NDVI map of Tashkent region.

Figure 4: NDVI change dynamics of the study area.

Figure 5: LULC in Tashkent region during 2000-2020.

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The main reason for doing LULC is to evaluate

the significant changes in the land surface over a long

period of time due to natural causes. serious changes

in the land cover caused a sharp change in the snow

cover against the background of global climate

change. as a result, it can be seen that the vegetation

cover was formed on the lands formed by the melting

of the snow cover, on the contrary, the amount of bare

land in the residential areas and resort zones increased

in the lands where there was a green cover (Fig. 6).

Annual precipitation data is derived from Version

4 of the CRU TS monthly high-resolution gridded

multivariate climate dataset (Juliev et al., 2022;

Teshaev et al., 2020; Aslanov et al., 2023;

Musirmonov et al., 2023; Juliev et al., 2023). The

downloaded data were analyzed in ArcGIS software

to create rainfall maps for the respective years. The

areas of the national park where bare land is growing,

a decline can be seen the amount of annual

precipitation while in the northern part the amount of

precipitation has increased (Fig. 8).

It can be seen from these maps that the annual

precipitation in the southwestern parts has decreased

sharply in recent decades, while the amount of heavy

precipitation has increased in the northeastern part of

the division. This conclusion was also clearly shown

by LULC maps (Fig. 5).

Figure 6: NDVI change dynamics of the study area.

Figure 7: Annual precipitation maps of the study area.

Analyses of Land Use Land Cover Change Detection of the Ugam Chatkal National Park, Uzbekistan

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Figure 8: Yearly Precipitation Chart (in millimeters) for the study area in 2000.

Figure 9: Yearly Precipitation Chart (in millimeters) for the study area in 2010.

Figure 10: Yearly Precipitation Chart (in millimeters) for the study area in 2020.

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4 CONCLUSIONS

The impact of global climate change in the Central

Asian region is becoming more severe every year. In

analyzing the dynamics of these changes, the

importance of RS and GIS systems is getting stronger

year by year.

- the greenness index has been increasing in the

national park for the past 20 years. This is mainly

observed in the northern and eastern parts of the

region;

- in the territory of the national park, a decrease in

snow cover was observed in the last 20 years, as a

result of which the growth of vegetation accelerated;

- as a result of anthropogenic effects, an increase

in bare lands was observed in the southwestern lands;

- the change in annual precipitation was observed

to increase mainly in the northern region and decrease

in the southern regions.

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