Change detection of land use in Ardabil city by means of GIS and RS Technology

Since agricultural plain lands of Ardabil have been important in providing food stuffs, and due to the necessities of land usage management in this section, determination of process and change-rating of land cover I important for developers. In this regard, dynamic temporal data of remote sensing can play an important role in searching and analyzing of land usage change which is done by means of numerical change detection techniques in which the descriptive process of changes in covering variety and situation of land use is based on the temporal series image data. Basic hypothesis in using remote sensing data is on the base of these criteria that claims the ascending or descending nature of changes between two or more periods is recognizable, and by comparing the related data from different years, we can detect mutual relationships between natural, social and economic parameters. In this study, maximum likelihood supervised classification and change detection techniques were applied to Land sat images acquired in 1990 and 2007, respectively, to map land cover changes in the Ardebil city. A supervised classification was carried out on reflective bands for the four images individually with the aid of ground truth data. Ground truth information collected were used to assess the accuracy of the classification results. Using ancillary data, and expert knowledge of the area through GIS further refined the classification results. Change detection technique was used to produce change image through cross-tabulation Changes among different land cover classes were assessed. During the study period, a very severe land cover change has taken place as a result of agricultural and urban development projects. These changes in land cover led to vegetation degradation and cropland in part of the study area.