Geographia Technica, Vol 15, Issue 2, 2020, pp. 93-105
LAND USE/COVER CHANGE IN DINEVAR RURAL AREA OF WEST IRAN DURING 2000-2018 AND ITS PREDICTION FOR 2024 AND 2030
Mohammad MALEKI 
, John Lodewijk VAN GENDEREN , Seyed Mohammad TAVAKKOLI-SABOUR, Samira Sadat SALEH, Ehsan BABAEE
ABSTRACT: Land use change, monitoring and predicting the future land use is often demanded by decision makers. Many land use change models have been developed aiming at the accurate prediction of land use changes. This study is aimed at mapping land use changes during past years and predicting the future trends in the rural environment of the Dinevar region to support local decision makers. For this research, we used the archive of Landsat satellite images of 2000, 2006, 2012 and 2018 to investigate the land-use changes in and initial pre-processes such as geometrical correction, radiometric correction. PCA was utilised to reduce the bands and multi-spectral images were fused with panchromatic band using Gram-Schmidt method to increase spatial separation. Four land uses of agriculture, rocky lands, pasture and bare soil were extracted through maximum likelihood method and predictions are made using CA-Markov chain. Land use for 2018 was predicted and the results were compared with the field observations, to evaluate the validity of the prediction method. Finally, the prediction was conducted for 2024 and 2030 land use. The highest extent of changes in the study period (2000-2030) was related to the change from pasture to bare soil with 1689 hectares. Based on the results, 0.7499% of changes were occurred between 2000 and 2006, 0.8562% between 2000 and 2012, and remaining 15% from 2012 to 2018. It indicates that the highest rate of changes in the area occurred within 2000-2006, while stagnation occurred in the period of 2006 to 2012. These changes increased during the last 5-years due to the promotion of rural life. The results show that human activity and lifestyle changes have caused many changes in LULC in the area. Based on the results of this paper, many aspects of rural, agricultural, natural hazard, natural resources and even social studies can be understood in the study Reasons of land use changes are discussed at the end.
Keywords: Lands use, predicting the changes, Ca-Markov, Dinevar Rural area.
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