Utilization of Remote Sensing Data and GIS Applications for Determination of the Land Cover Change in Karbala Governorate

Utilization of Remote Sensing Data and GIS Applications for Determination of the Land Cover Change in Karbala Governorate

Dr. Abdul Razzak T.Ziboon

Building and Construction Engineering Department, University of Technology/ Baghdad

Email: razzak1956@yahoo.com

Dr. Imzahim Abdulkareem Alwan

Building and Construction Engineering Department, University of Technology/ Baghdad

Alaa Ghadhban Khalaf

Ministry of Science and Technology, Directorate of Space and Telecom Technology, Remote Sensing Research Center/Baghdad

Eng. &Tech. Journal, Vol.31, Part (A), No.15, 2013, Pages: 2773-2787:

 

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: Land cover, Remote Sensing, GIS, Landsat, SPOT.

INTRODUCTION 

  and cover is described as “vegetational and artificial constructions covering the land surface” by Anderson et al. (1976). Land cover changes can be used to identify direct and indirect processes of land degradation. Human/natural modifications on land cover have resulted in degradation, deforestation, biodiversity loss, global warming and increase in natural disasters. Growing population, urban expansion, cropland loss and etc. create a pressure on land cover. This pressure results in unplanned and uncontrolled changes in land cover. Land cover changes leading to severe environmental problem are generally caused by mismanagement of agricultural, urban, and forest lands. Therefore, available data on land cover changes can provide critical insights in the decision-making process for environmental management and planning the future.(Ikiel C.,2011).

  Land-use and land-cover change, as one of the main driving forces of global environmental change, is central to the sustainable development debate. Land use and land-cover changes have impacts on a wide range of environmental and landscape attributes including the quality of water, land and air resources, ecosystem processes and function, and the climate system itself through greenhouse gas fluxes and surface albedo effects (Rimal,B.,2011).In recent decades, remote sensing with multi-temporal high resolution satellite data have been widely used to obtain land cover information such as degradation level of forests and wetlands, rate of urbanization, intensity of agricultural activities, and other human-induced changes. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provide a flexible environment and a powerful tool in analyzing spatial information. The integration of the Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are important tools to study changes in land cover patterns and dynamics in order to obtain rapid, economical, reliable, and accurate results. In remote sensing technology, classification as a common image processing technique is utilized to obtain data regarding land cover types. In classification process, supervised classification with the maximum likelihood method, which is also utilized in this study, has been widely used in remote sensing applications. (Ikiel C., 2011).

Studying changes in land cover pattern using remotely-sensed data is based on the comparison of time-sequential data. In this study four different satellite images were used, Landsat MSS, Landsat TM, Landsat ETM, and SPOT 5 which have different dates. Land cover patterns were evaluated separately for each image and a comparative analysis was conducted for the study period (1976-2011) with using supervised classification approach. The main objective of this study is to determine the land cover changes between 1976 and 2011 using remote sensing data and GIS applications for investigation of the spatial and temporal changes.

STUDY AREA 

  The study area is a part of Karbala Governorate in the south of Iraq. The study area is bounded by the coordinate (from 43° 57' 31.98'' E to 44° 15' 12.09'' E) longitude and (from 32° 20' 51.05'' N to 32° 35' 52.16'' N) latitude in zone 38N according to UTM projected coordinate system. It covers an area of 768Km2 . The selected area could be recognized in Figure (1), which illustrates the Iraq map with selection window representing the study area.

Figure (1) The map of Iraq with selection window represents the selected study area.

Full Text   Click Here