Analysis of landuse change in metropolises using satellite imagery analysis in ENVI Case study: Ahvaz metropolis

Introduction One of the main challenges in the urban sprawl process of developing countries is their rapid growth that if this growth be a sporadic growth without planning would have numerous problems to urban planning and management.This unplanned growth, in addition to the destruction of agricultural land leads to urban tensions such as rising land prices, rising prices for urban services, and so on.In general, economic growth over the past decades in the country and the need to coordinate with global developments have caused most of Iran's major cities, such as Tehran, Isfahan, and Tabriz to be subject to rapid changes from the point of view of land use.Ahvaz is also one of these cities that has undergone fundamental changes due to its particular situation in the last few years.
Material and methods The present research is applied study with descriptive-analytical methodology.Data collection in the descriptive section was carried out through the study of library documents and in the analytical part of the research, through the extraction of TM images (Thematic Mapper) from the years 1985 and 2013 for Ahvaz city.In order to achieve the goal of research and analysis of the images, the ENVI and GIS software were used.In this regard, after the preprocessing, the atmospheric correction and the selection of the most suitable bands for classifying and applying the maximum likelihood similarity (MLL) method, the controlled classification was performed in the ENVI software that the overall accuracy of the extracted map with the maximum probability algorithm in this research was calculated for 2013 (98.11%) and 1989 (94.23%).Then, land use changes in revealed in GIS software, and results were verified by checking severalexamples on the field.
Result and discussion The findings of the research show that during the 24 years of study, the percentage of wasteland, gardens and green spaces has been reduced for the built land and roads.Reducing the ratio of gardens and agricultural lands in this area can be a major problem in land use changes in the present period.Also, by investigating the green spaces conditions inside the city, it was found that Ahvaz city, despite the improvement of greenery conditions in recent years, has been suffering from the shortage of this property inside the city due to the significant increase in population.The observed changes in the field of urban land development during the mentioned years showed that the areas with the most development in terms of land construction are among the most populous and at the same time the most migratory areas in Ahvaz which can be said that urban sprawl has grown, especially in the southern parts of the city.
Result The results of this study indicate that the most land development in Ahvaz is located in the southern and eastern parts of the city.Although lands for future urban development is an opportunity for any city, but widespread and unplanned changes that mention the concept of scattered growth in the city of Ahvaz will make the providing of facilities, infrastructure and services difficult.