Monitoring and prediction of land use/land cover changes and water requirements in the basin of the Urmia Lake, Iran

Abstract As one of the largest super-saline lakes in world, Lake Urmia northwestern Iran has been facing severe drying recent years. Drought and rapid expansion agricultural activities are considered to be main driving factors shrinking lake. To address this problem, an analysis spatiotemporal dynamics land use/land cover (LULC) is important. This research implemented a multi-source satellite image through support vector machine (SVM) for mapping LULC distributions years 2000, 2010, 2020. Cellular automata (CA)–Markov was prepared modeling future landscape changes 2030 2040. In last step, water requirement agriculture catchment area simulated NETWAT model. Through employed modeling, it found that areas covered by irrigated gardens will grow from 1,450 395 km2 3,600 1,650 2040, respectively, as deduced occurred 2000 increase 1.5 billion cubic metres more than 4.1