Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment

Determining land use/land cover changes in Arsbaran region, North West of Iran

Author(s):

Mehrdad Akbarzadeh ¹, Sasan Babaei Kafaki ², Shahram Shahrokhi ¹, Jalil Ajalli ¹, Habib Khodabandeh ¹

Recieved Date: 2011-01-10, Accepted Date: 2011-04-05

Abstract:

Recent perspective for land cover types and land cover changes that have taken place during the last fourteen years in Ilghineh Chay basin of Arasbaran region was studied. Arasbaran is located in east northern part of Azerbijan-e-Sharqi province of Iran. Fragile ecosystem is created in this area, because of having mountainous forests and special standing condition. In this study, maximum likelihood supervised classification and post- classification change detection techniques were applied to land sat images acquired in 1987 and 2002. A supervised classification was carried out on six reflective bands for two mentioned images, individually. Cross-classification was used to produce change detection map in the north western forests of Iran. Results revealed that the study area has undergone a very severe land cover change as a result of mismanagement and economical condition. A considerable increase in rangeland has taken place as well as increase in cropland and the area of forest stands has decreased, considerably. Land degradation processes in the study area were converting forest to rangeland, rangeland to cropland and cropland to bare land. It was found that degradation of rangeland was due to overgrazing and the main cause of convertion rangeland to cropland was low incoming and bad economical condition of people living in the study area. Mismanagement of natural resources, especially forest stands, was also the cause of forest degradation. It was concluded that environmental evaluation and new planning for ecosystem management seem to be necessary.

Keywords:

Iran, Arasbaran, Ilghineh Chay basin, remote sensing data, change detection, land cover, GIS, forest, cropland, rangeland

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Journal: Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment
Year: 2011
Volume: 9
Issue: 2
Category: Environment
Pages: 618-622

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