Utilization of remote sensing data and GIS applications for determination of the land cover change in Karbala Governorate

Abstract EN

This study was conducted to determine the land cover changes between year 1976 and year 2011 in Karbala Governorate by using an integrated approach of remote sensing data and GIS applications for investigation of the spatial and temporal changes.

A part of Karbala Governorate, whose Area is 768 km2 was selected as study area.

Four cloud free Landsat MSS, TM, ETM+, and SPOT scenes covering the study area were selected for analysis.

Images were acquired in years 1976, 1990, 2001, and 2011 respectively.

All images which mentioned above are rectified and registered in Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) projection zone 38 N and supervised image classification system has been observed to classify the images in different land cover categories.

Six land cover classes have been identified and used to determine the change in land cover in study area and these classes are : Agricultural land, Water bodies, Urban Area, Sand dunes, Bare soil, and Waterlogged Area.

According to the results obtained from statistics of classification, it was observed that most changes occurred in heterogeneous agricultural areas.

It is thought that the main reasons of this change are increasing population pressure, increasing sand dunes, appearance and increasing waterlogged area and changing economic activities.

Those reasons have been led to the decrease of the agricultural areas in study area during period from year 2001 to 2011.