Evaluation of Land Cover Changes Ysing Remote Sensing Technique (Case study: Hableh Rood Subwatershed of Shahrabad Basin)

The growing population and increasing socio-economic necessities creates a pressure on land use/land cover. Nowadays, land use change detection using remote sensing data provides quantitative and timely information for management and evaluation of natural resources. This study investigates the land use changes in part of Hableh Rood Watershed of Iran using Landsat 7 and 8 (Sensor ETM+ and OLI) images between 2001 and 2013. Supervised classification was used for classification of Landsat images. Four land use classes were delineated including rangeland, irrigated farming and plantations land, and dry farming lands,urban. Visual interpretation, expert knowledge of the study area and ground truth information accumulated with field works to assess the accuracy of the classification results. Overall accuracy of 2001 and 2013 image classification was 81.48 (Kappa coefficient: 0.7340) and 87.04 (Kappa coefficient: 0.7841), respectively. The results showed considerable land cover changes for the given study area. Land cover change detection showed that in a period of 12 years, 277.57 hectares of dry farming lands and 340 hectares of dense range have been lost. But, 341 hectares for low dense range, 280 hectares for semi dense range and 1.4 hectares for urban areas, have been added in area.