Land use Changes Prediction and Environmentally Unstable Areas Prioritization of Halil-Rud River Basin

Land use change prediction can provide necessary input for decision-making of environmental management and the future planning. The aims of this study was assess the Land use change and to predict the change for 2030, 2042 and 2054 by Markov chain model and to prioritize sub-watersheds using fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) in order to recognize and manage environmentally unstable areas in the future. Land use changes were examined applying Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographic Information System (GIS) in Halil-Rud river basin. For this purpose, Landsat TM, ETM and OLI images and Maximum Likelihood (ML) classifier algorithm were used for 1994, 2006 and 2018 and five types of Land use including middle grassland, poor grassland, agriculture (cultivation-gardening), water coverage (including water of river, reservoir and wetland) and other non-vegetation uses (including rocky surface, mountain, soil, very poor grassland and settlement) were identified in the basin. Results showed that during 2018-2054, middle and poor grasslands and water coverage will change to agriculture and devoid of vegetation lands in such a way that the share of middle and poor grassland coverage will decrease by 65.12 percent. Also, finding of FAHP approach indicated that sub-watersheds of Roodbar-Jonub and Ghalehganj will face the most severe environmental crises over the next 36 years. Finally, Land use and environmental conditions are predicted critical for all the sub-watersheds in 2054. Therefore, it is very necessary to apply policies (including water resources management) to change the level basin environmental destruction process.