Authors
Abstract
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.
Keywords
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