Transforming Landscapes, Shaping Risk: Land Cover Change and Disaster Vulnerability in Parshuram Municipality (2005–2025)

Parshuram Municipality, situated at the fragile Chure–Inner Terai interface of Dadeldhura District, embodies a landscape shaped by young, erodible geology and mounting human pressures. This study explores spatiotemporal land-use and land-cover (LULC) change from 2005 to 2025 and its driving forces. Freely available Landsat 5, 7, and 8 images were downloaded from USGS and subset to the municipal boundary in UTM45N WGS84, and seven LULC classes—forest, agriculture, grassland, water body, sedimentation, landslide, and settlement were defined per the Land Use Act 2019. Supervised maximum likelihood classification with seven training samples per class was performed in GIS and validated against ground truth in Google Earth Pro. Agricultural land expanded from 8% to 60% between 2005 and 2015, then contracted to 33% by 2025 (–27%). Forest cover declined from 29 % to 5 % (–24 %) before recovering to 14 % (+9 %). Grasslands fell from 35 % to 9 % (–26 %), while sedimentation areas surged from 5 % to 32 % (+27 %). Water bodies remained near 4 %, settlements shrank from 14 % to 6 % (–8 %), and landslide zones shifted from 7 % to 3 % (–4 %). Concurrent increases in flood and landslide events documented in municipal disaster records underscore the compounded risk posed by these LULC shifts. These trends reflect human encroachment, haphazard settlement expansion, and intensified erosion under monsoonal extremes. Mitigating disaster vulnerability and fostering sustainable development will require integrated land management, targeted reforestation, nature-based slope stabilization, and a geospatial early-warning system.