Land use map production of Kaftareh catchment using remote sensing technique

One of the important factors for programming and management of natural resources, especially to achieve sustainable development purposes is acquiring enough information about current land use/land cover. Remote sensing techniques are the best methods to produce land use maps. In this research, supervised classification method with maximum likelihood algorithm was used to prepare the land use map. The case study is Kaftareh catchment located in Ardabil province and in this investigation; Landsat 8 images acquired in 2014 were applied. The results showed that dry farming, irrigated lands, rangelands and bare lands are the major land uses respectively in the area. The classification accuracy was assessed by kappa index and overall accuracy that 93.20% and 96.24% were obtained respectively. According to our results, Landsat 8 images have high capability to produce the land use maps. NDVI index was used to prepare the vegetation density map and the results showed that the major parts of the rangelands are covered by weak vegetation density class in the studied area.