Investigation of land-use changes using satellite images in Zarand region, Kerman

Land-use changes especially agricultural lands have a significant impact on  the microclimate of a region,natural resrource managrment and land-atmoshptre interactions .Remote sensing is a reliable and precise techniques in generating land-use maps. The aim of this study, is producing to a land use map by and detection of land cover pattern changes including urban,industrial agricultural and fallow land in Zarand region, Kerman province,south of Iran, during 1987 to 2020. In order to classify land use in four above mentioned types, three methods of maximum likelihood, artificial neural network, and support vector machine were used. The support vector machine was found to be the best performing method. In general, the generated land-use maps in the studied years showed an increase of 64,17 and 2 hectares in the agricultural, urban and industrial land uses, respectively. The observed increase in industrial and agricultural lands are quite important in possible changes of cropping pattern and agroclimatic condtion of the region and needs further investigatin in long term environmental management planing.