An Assessment of Land use Changes Employing the Remote Sensing Techniques during Three Temporal Periods on the Abshoran Watershed, Kermanshah

One of the important challenges and issues in land management programs is that of physical growth of cities in different directions over time. The transformation of non-urban watersheds into urban ones has led to some environmental challenges and problems. An overall management plan needs accurate spatial information at consecutive times. Remote sensing technology offers great help in identifying and detecting land use changes. The aim of this study was to detect land use changes using images collected from 1991 and 2001 Landsat 5 satellite¢s TM sensor and 2018 images provided by the Landsat 8 satellite¢s OLI sensor over a period of 27 years on Abshuran Watershed, the Kermanshah. Following the required procedures in the preprocessing stage, a change detection map was prepared with an acceptable accuracy with supervised classification in the ENVI5.3 software environment. The results indicated that during the 2001-2018 periods, about 1.17 % of the share of the rangeland and farmland decreased and that the urban and residential lands increased from 5.92 % to 17.19 % of the total area. Most of the land use change has occurred in the urban and residential areas, thus an increase in the impermeable areas causes an increase in natural disasters such as flooding in addition to some negative effects on natural resources.