Monitoring and trending of landuse changes in Abarkooh Basin, using sattelite images (1976 - 2014)

Due to changes in landuse that is done mostly by human activities, change detection of landuse and assessment of theirs environmental impact is essential, in order to future planning and manage the resources. Therefore the aims of this study are monitoring, detection and trending of landuse changes in Abarkooh basin (1976-2014), in order to
assess the environmental issues such as human stress on earth without considering tolerance capacity, and identify the regions having management stress. In this way, the data of Landsat satellite images, sensors MSS (1976), TM (1990), ETM (2000 and 2006) and OLI (2014); and techniques of remote sensing, such as supervised classification
and accuracy assessment of post classification were used to identify the type of land use. Also, principal component analysis, tasseled cap and Image differencing were used to monitor the landuse changes. The Classification results show the seven types of landuses, including urban, agriculture, bare, rock, range, clay and playa lands, and which 2014 year, with kappa values of 82.18%, and total accuracy of 0.76 have the highest accuracy of classification. The trending result of landuse changes indicate the increasing trend of area in the range (5.65%), rock (2.52%), bare (3.63%) and agriculture (1.04%) lands, and the downward trend of area in the urban (4.33%), clay (6.89%) and playa (6.03%) lands, respectively. From the base of principal component analysis and tasseled cap functions, respectively 1.748% (306.4912 km2) and 3.989 % (699.961 km2) of the study area has been faced with positive changes of landuse, but the general trend of positive changes classes is increasing. The most of the changes are devastating and are according to the human community centers such as Abarkooh and Mehrdasht cities. It is evident that continuation of this trend, in the near future, converts Abarkooh basin into a dead and inactive ecosystem that has no potential ecological and biological of production.