Using remote sensing and gis techniques to study and assess environmental changes in Alhabbaniya lake and surrounding area

Abstract EN

The study area lies in the central part of Iraq, in Al-Anbar Governorate, it covers about (4400) km2.It includes Al-Habbinya Lake which represent touristic region and waterish reserves used for water balance management of Euphrates River.

Remote sensing and GIS techniques were adopted as practical tools for long term monitoring of Al-Habbinya Lake (1990-2001) to study Environmental change detection in the study area using ERDAS 9.1 Imagine and Arc GIS 9.1 programs.

Supervised classifications were applied for the LANDSAT5 and LANDSAT7 images to classify the data and determine the change which took place during the period (1990-2001).

The outcomes of these processes are two classification maps display eight classes of the land cover types for TM (1990) image in total classification accuracy reached 91.14 % and a kappa coefficient 0.8989, eight classes of the land cover types for ETM (2001) image in total classification accuracy reached 93.06 % and a kappa coefficient 0.9221.

The obtained result shows increase in area of vegetation, muddy soil, moist land and decrease in area of water, bare soil, bare soil with gravel, and sabkha during the period from 1990 to 2001.