Preparing Ghoorichay Catchment Land Cover Map Using Satellite Image Analysis

Land use/land cover has long been considered for natural resource planning and management and remote sensing techniques are the best tools to produce land use/cover maps. There are various methods for preparing land use maps.

The purpose of this study is to prepare a land cover map of Ghoorichay watershed using processing and classification of satellite images, which is one of the most important watersheds of Ardabil province.

For this purpose, Landsat 8 satellite images related to June 2015 were classified using supervised maximum likelihood and fuzzy classification methods.

The results showed that rangelands, bare lands, dry lands, and residential lands (village) are the major land uses in the area, respectively. According to the results, maximum likelihood method with kappa coefficient of 0.82 and overall accuracy of %88 is more accurate than fuzzy classification method with kappa coefficient of 0.81 and overall accuracy of %87.

Based on the results of this study, despite the high capability of satellite images in the preparation of land use map, in order to increase the accuracy of classification, peripheral parameters should be used.