Investigating the trend of land use changes using Landsat satellite images

The rapid increase in population followed by the excessive development of urban and rural areas has accelerated the process of land use changes in recent decades. The use of new remote sensing technologies in surveying the process of land use changes is one of the efficient and low-cost methods. Therefore, in the current research, the land use changes of the Shahar Chai basin were investigated through satellite images of Landsat sensors TM and OLI-TIRS for the years 1995, 2005, and 2021. In order to prepare the land use maps of the area, the supervised classification method and the maximum likelihood algorithm were used in ENVI software. The results of land use changes showed that during the statistical period under study, agricultural land uses and gardens, residential areas, and water areas have been increasing and their area has increased in each period. In contrast, the area of barren lands and pastures shows a decreasing trend. So that the area of agricultural lands and gardens and residential areas in 1995 was 18802.73 and 2784.56 hectares, respectively, and in 2021, this amount has reached 19738.81 and 5735.61 hectares.