Investigation on the Qualitative Changes of Tehran green space, between 1990 and 2006(Case study: District 5 of Tehran municipality)

Regarding the vegetation's crucial role in urban environment, investigation on the change detection seems to be necessary. Therefore, the usage of remote sensing was noticed to be important to study the changes.
In this study, to estimate the qualitative changes of vegetation cover, the NDVI was applied and Tm and IRS images of 1990 and 2006 were used and vegetation maps of District 5 of Tehran municipality by underlining the different greenness levels were generated.
Findings: Statistics revealed that the area of good and moderate greenness level vegetated lands decreased and the area of poor greenness level vegetated lands increased by 23.22, 684.27 and 299.43 ha respectively. It is important to mention that to find out the procedure of qualitative changes of the study area's vegetation cover post-classification change detection technique applied and results indicated that non-vegetated areas converted to poor and moderate greenness level vegetated lands by 0.9 and 186.48 ha respectively. Also the conversion of 419.58 ha of poor and 175.86 ha of moderate greenness level vegetated lands to non-vegetated lands was noticed.

The maximum amount of increased non-vegetated area and destroyed moderate and good greenness level vegetated lands were studied in region number 2. So, region number 2, in comparison with other six regions has been changed the most during 1990 to 2006. The equal amount of increased non-vegetated area and decreased vegetated area by 408.06 ha showed that land use changes have been accrued in study area, therefore conservation and increase the urban vegetated areas are important to develop urban master plans.