Investigation of the trend of land use changes in Rey city using remote sensing data

Rey city has experienced unprecedented urban growth in recent decades that leading to drastic changes in the land use of the region. Therefore, the purpose of this article was to investigate the changes in land use area of Rey city during the years 1988 to 2006 using aerial photographs and satellite images of Landsat and IRS. With supervised and unsupervised classification of the satellite images, 4 land uses types including urban lands, agricultural lands, green spaces and barren lands were extracted. Land use layers were compared in pairs and the rate of land use changes was extracted. The results showed that urban land use made and urban green space have increased 369.7 and 55.6 hectares, respectively, and agricultural lands and barren lands have decreased 213.8 and 211.5 hectares, respectively. The growth of residential areas during a period of 6 years from 2000 to 2006 totally with 212.7 hectares has been faster changed than a period of 12 years from 1988 to 2000 with 157 hectares. A pairwise comparison matrix of land uses was used to determine the amount of environmental damages caused by unprincipled changes in the region land uses in the studying period. The results show that the conversion of barren lands, agriculture and urban green space into residential lands with the amounts 44.65, 42.44 and 14.85 causes high degree of environmental damages. Land use change, especially the loss of vegetation, has a negative impact on the landscape.