Detection of Land Use Changes for Thirty Years Using Remote Sensing and GIS (Case Study: Ardestan Area)

Due to the increase of changes in the land uses mainly resulting from human interferences, monitoring the changes and evaluating their trend and environmental effects for future planning and management are essential. In the present study, an attempt is made to observe the changes which had occurred in Ardestan area during a period of 30 years using some satellite images. Different kinds of data for every year in three time intervals of 1976, 1990 and 2006 were retrieved from the images; then, using LMM model and GIS software, the rate of changes for each piece of data was calculated. Different methods of classification were tested. In this study, four classes of land uses were gained for each year. The results show that for 30 years, the area of residential zones had increased from 31. to 528.3 ha and the area of agricultural lands had decreased from 440.6 to 346.3 ha. Also, considering the changes of the area, almost 31% of the total area of the region had undergone some changes during the studied period which is a symptom of man interference. Studies have also shown that changes of rangeland into residential lands had occupied the maximum area during last 30 years.