1.2 Study Area and Data

The selected study area of Nepal has 36,042 wards (level 5?), 3,647 local authority (level 3) units, 75 districts (level 2 units) divided into six states. Nepal can be divided into three belts: Terai (down belt), Hill (middle belt) and the Mountain Regions. These different belts also represents, respectively, the decreasing order of population density as shown in Figure 2 (?). The population density of Nepal varies from 0 people per hectare to 1476 people per hectare with median and mean ~3, and ~8 respectively.