studying land use-cover changes during the last three decades in hamedan province using satellite images

during the time, land cover and as a result land use patterns go through fundamental changes and human factors can have the most important role in this process. knowing these changes could be of great help to the future management of this region. according to this, the main purpose of this study is to monitor the land use-cover changes in the hamedan province area during the three recent decades. therefore, in order to discover the changes created in the study area, images of tm satellite sensor (1989), etm satellite sensor (2000) and liss3 detector of irs (2008) were processed. then after performing needed preprocesses, the enhancements were performed and then by using supervised classification with maximum likelihood method, land-use cover objective maps were prepared. these maps were compared with the post classification comparison method in form of a couple in the first period between 1989-2000 and the second period between 2008-2009. the results shows that the area of the land use-cover classes, rangelands and plain lands were decreased during the three decades and on the other hand water area, arid and residential-industrial area were increasing during this period. woodland areas decreased during the first period and increased in the second period. however, farmlands’ area increased during the first period and decreased during the second one.