Talk:Geography of Nepal

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== Headline text ==Bold textGeography of Nepal Tibet is located in the northwestern corner of nepal there is many plants and animals there.

[edit] Quibbles

Generally good, but here are a few quibbles:

"Below 1,200 meters, the dominant form of vegetation consists of tropical and subtropical rain forests."

In the more populated areas, "rain forests" are attentuated by human activity such as grazing, collecting fodder, and woodcutting that opens the forest floor to sunlight and decreases humidity.

Also the climate tends toward dry and hot in the spring before the monsoon arrives. Dryness intensifies to the west, and there are moderate rain shadows, for example north of the Mahabharat Range. One often encounters dry forest rather than rainforest below 2,000 meters, or even higher on carbonate substrates where the more abundant rainfall nevertheless quickly sinks into the ground.

"Nepal can be divided into three major river systems from east to west: the Kosi River, the Narayani River (India's Gandak River), and the Karnali River."

This overlooks the Bagmati River draining the Kathmandu Valley lies between the Kosi and Narayani systems. Similarly the (west) Rapti River lies between the Narayani and Karnali systems, finally joining the Karnali in Gorakhpur, India where it is notorious for causing floods. These rivers rise in the middle hills about halfway between the Mahabharat Range and the Himalaya. With no glacial sources, they are more variable in flow than the three largest rivers; nevertheless they are significant rivers, even in the dry season.

Other streams arise on the southern slopes of the Mahabharat Range, or in the Siwaliks. These are highly seasonal. During the dry season they may dry up completely, or disappear underground traversing the alluvial bhabhar zone, then may reappear below it. Individually these streams are undeniably much less impressive than the three largest river systems, yet they are numerous, important collectively, and ought to have been mentioned.

"The word tarai, a term presumed to be derived from Persian, means "damp," and it appropriately describes the region's humid and hot climate."

Although in Nepali "tarai" (or "terai") colloquially refers to any lowlands south of the Mahabharat Range, the original meaning of the word in Persian especially applies to a zone of abundant aquifers along the base of the Siwalik range.

The Siwaliks are the outermost, most recently uplifted sub-range of the greater Himalaya. They are formed of alluvium washed down from older ranges to the north, but never buried deeply enough to be strongly metamorphosed, so the rock formations are poorly consolidated, permeable and easily eroded. The products of this erosion have been deposited along the base of the Siwaliks as a zone of sand, gravel and boulders some kilometers wide called the Bhabhar.

Rainfall in the Siwaliks is either absorbed by the poorly consolidated rocks, or it flows into streams crossing the bhabhar zone where it tends to sink into the sand and gravel. In either case this water ends up in the bhabhar alluvium and percolates downhill through it until it gives out. Below the bhabhar are less permeable formations made from fine sediments that cannot take up water as fast as it percolates down from above. The excess water surfaces in springs and marshes that persist long into, perhaps even completely through the dry season.

The year-round supply of moisture favors the development of dense forests, whereas valley bottoms without abundant groundwater near the surface during the dry season would have more open, scrubbier forests or open savanna and is more easily cleared for agriculture. The moister Terai forests just below the bhabhar are at warm, low elevations, so the habitat is excellent for mosquitos including varieties that transmit malaria.

Nepal's government capitalized on this as a defensive measure. Decrees protected the wet forest zone against logging or clearing by settlers that would have exposed the ground to sunlight, making the zone drier and less malarial. With endemic malaria, it was nearly uninhabitable except by Tharus and perhaps a few other ethnic groups who had evolved a degree of malaria resistance along with behavioral adaptations minimizing exposure to the nocturnal mosquitos. This moist forest belt was wide enough that an invading army heading for the "hills" probably would have been forced to spend at least one night in the malarial forest, putting the troops at risk of contracting a disease that was invariably debilitating and often fatal.

Then after Nepal's isolation ended in the early 1950s DDT was applied in and around houses to suppress mosquitos and thus suppress the vector that transmitted the infecting parasite between people. This finally opened the Terai to settlement by land-hungry subsistence farmers from the middle hills, led to extensive clearing of forests and negatively impacted wildlife particularly the large mammals for which the Terai was famous.

Hill region:

"Two major ranges of hills, commonly known as the Mahabharat Lekh and Siwalik Range (or Churia Range), occupy the region."

Lumping the Siwaliks and Mahabharat ranges may be geologically valid, but in a political and cultural sense the hill region starts at the crest of the Mahabharat Lekh (range). This range's steep southern slopes are essentially an uninhabited no-man's-land, in effect a broad line of demarcation between hill and Terai cultures. However the broad crest of this range and its gentler northern slopes are inhabited by Brahmans, Chhetris, Magars and other hill peoples.

Culturally the Siwaliks are part of the Terai. In fact Siwalik uplands have poor alluvial soil extremely unsuited to agriculture, so they are uninhabited except by a few primitive hunter-gatherer tribes. However densely-populated inner Terai valleys lie north of the Siwaliks, or in the case of the Deukhuri valley in western Nepal, between sub-ranges of the Siwaliks. Despite the recent influx of settlers from the hills, the pre-existing population was predominantly Tharu in the countryside and Indian in bazaar towns.

Then the "hills" north of the Mahabharat Range should be differentiated into valleys such as Surkhet in the west, Pokhara in the center and Kathmandu in the east that are agriculturally productive enough to support significant urbanization, "hills" below 2,000 meters where rice can be cultivated given a supply of water for irrigation, and the higher hills.

Brahmans, Chhetris and Newars dominate in the valleys and lower hills where rice is grown. The higher hills are populated by Kham, Magar, Tamang, Rai, Limbu and others who grow hardier grains such as maize, barley and millet, and potatoes up to about 3,000 meters. They also pasture sheep, cattle and goats up to perhaps 5,000 meters in the higher "hills" and lower slopes of the main Himalayan range.

Therefore a second line of cultural demarcation should be drawn in the hills at about 2,000 meters between the Brahman-Chhetri, rice-growing, Indo-European-speaking settlements of the valleys and lower slopes, and settlements higher up where indigenous peoples such as Magar, Kham, Thamang, Rai and Limbu speak languages related to Tibetan and grow hardier crops such as millet, barley, maize and potatoes up to about 3,000 meters and then pasture cattle, sheep and goats up to about 5,000 meters. These people become progressively more like Tibetans in language, religious affiliation, architecture, technology and economy as one travels north and/or to higher elevations. Although there may be a sharp geological line of demarcation between "hills" and "mountains" where the southern faces of the snowy Himalayas abruptly rise thousands of meters, there is no corresponding abrupt cultural transition there.

Finally the "mountain" zone needs more differentiation. The zone of permanent snow above about 5,000 meters is essentially uninhabited, however there are a number of slightly lower inhabited valleys among and immediately north of the highest Himalayan ranges including Humla and Jumla in the west, along the Kali Gandaki and north of the Anapurna range (Manang) in the center, and along the Arun River in the east. These valleys are in a rain shadow, but fields are irrigated with meltwater from the high peaks.

Also there are several parallel high ranges. For example a northward transect of west-central Nepal would cross the Dhaulagiri Range whose highest peaks average nearly 8,000 meters, drop into the canyon of the upper Bheri River, climb over the slightly lower Kanjiroba Range, drop to about 5,000 meters in the inhabited Jumla region, and finally would climb to about 6,000 meters at the crest of the frontier range separating Nepal from Tibet and tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems.