Prediction and Uncertainty Analysis of land Use Changes in the Zarineh Roud Basin

Changes land use is the main component in water resources studies and have been proposed as one of the main reasons for the reduction in inflow to the Lake Urmia. Estimation of changes in future landscape due to their potential trends as well as the policies conducted in the basin¡ can be effective in decision-making and remedy for resolving Urmia Lake environmental crisis. In this study has been tried to extract and assess the historical changes in land use in the Zarineh basin using satellite images and a projection of the future land use changes has beenprovided.Results show that between2000 and 2013¡ on average¡ most of changes are to increase land use¡ such as irrigated agriculture (40%) and gardens (57%) and also to reduce pasture land (5%) and dry land farming (10%). This trend has also been observed for horizon 2020. Uncertainty analysis of results of lanuse prediction for horizon2020 show that the irrigated agriculture¡ dry land farming and gardens lanuses respectively by reliability of 73¡ 85 and 48 percent¡ have the largest prediction uncertainty.