Nepal is experiencing forest degradation and deforestation due to diverse drivers which are more geographically distributed and having impact at different levels. Those causes and their spatial distribution can be assessed using geospatial approach through GIS, Remote Sensing, and GPS technologies. This approach involves mainly spatial analysis of the resources and their causal factors. Nepal has also implemented several successful forest conservation programs such as Community Forest Development Program, perceived as the most successful program at government initiation. The forest degradation and restoration both can be assessed using GIS technologies. Nepal has already experienced adoption of such technologies to develop the dataset and monitor the forest resource in terms of land use land cover and, forest cover change over the period as a part of National Forest Inventory.
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Nepal is considered as a country with rugged terrain and complex landscape with higher altitudinal variation due to which it has varieties of micro-climatic areas with specific landscape functions and ecosystem services. Despite of all these variations, complexities and diverse actors to determine the natural resources, Nepal has 44% forest coverage (FRA, 2014) which is higher than the forest area coverage of 39.6% in 1994 (DFRS, 1994). These positive changes in the forest cover were because of the community forestry program hugely implemented since 1990. We can also find such type of evaluation of the community forestry intervention in Nepal using functionalities of vegetation indices to use remote sensing images to monitor the forest cover changes over the period. The spatial variation in the natural resource levels, spatial diversities of the forest cover changes and geographic nature of the data were not fully explored. Thus, the geospatial approach offers to define the spatial variations in natural resource, its changes over time, spatial thinking while resource management, prediction and modeling for the future scenario.
Government of Nepal, International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and other development organizations are working in forestry, environment and development sector since long in history, however there are evident actions done by those organizations to develop the core forestry and allied data in Nepal such as to work together with Survey Department, Remote Sensing Center, National Land use Project (NLUP), Water Energy Commission Secretariat (WECS), Environment Division to work on the development of the forest coverage over the period like Forest Resource Assessment projects in 1994 and 2014, National Geographic Information Infrastructure Project (NGIIP) through Finnish Mapping Company (FINNMAP FM-International) in 2004, Land use mapping and zoning since 2010 and to date. Those attempts provide up-to-date information on forest resources in Nepal. Non-state actors such as NGOs, bilateral organizations and academic institutions are providing further science based and research-based exploration on those data such as decadal land cover data, which ultimately indicates the extent of forest cover changes. By taking input from this land cover data generated during 1990 to 2010, carbon flux from the forest was estimated considering other studies i.e. demand and supply of the timber and fuelwood, forest types, population growth etc. The study was done using the IPCC Guidelines (2006) to estimate the carbon flux from the forest from 1990 to 2010 by “Gain and Loss” method.
ICIMOD has also been conducting the study on “Low Cost Forest Monitoring” aiming to support the science and national level stakeholders by estimating the forest stock in terms of biomass and forest carbon using multi-source forest inventory techniques. This multi-source inventory technique uses the inputs from the Remote Sensing data, spatial analysis, Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and the field measurement. The high-resolution satellite images were used to generate the templates for the quick estimation of the forest stock which can be used with Google Earth High Resolution images. Formerly Department of Forests (DOF) and now Department of Forests and Soil Conservation (DOFSC) has initiated 'Satellite based Forest Fire Monitoring and Alert System' in collaboration with ICIMOD, Nepalese Forester's Association (NFA), and Federation of Community Forest User Group Nepal (FECOFUN) which ultimately provides the forest fire information to the subscribed users on the fire location since 2012. The alert system sends the short message system (SMS) and email alerts when fire happens and satellite passes which can be used as the basis for the forest fire management. ICIMOD is also working on the analysis of forest vulnerability, fragmentation of the forest areas, species distribution mapping, and consolidating all the effort for the forest management as a knowledge base in the form of Web enabled mapping and information system i.e. Forest fire alert system, and Reducing Emission from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) mechanism demands REDD Information System. These efforts can contribute nationally on the development of Monitoring/measuring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) system, Reference Emission Level (REL), National Forest Management Database and Data sharing mechanism as a part of National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS) and globally forestry sciences taking the support from the spatial domain.