Water cover change detection in Zayandeh-Rood watershed using remote sensing

Water, as one of the most basic needs of life, currently includes our drinking, agriculture, industry, economic-social and security-political issues for survival and expansion. Due to the importance of this issue, the basic management and exploitation of water resources has become one of the important global issues. Nowadays, remote sensing technique has many uses in agriculture, such as determining the area under cultivation and predicting crop yield. In this research, the evaluation of the detection method of zones, water levels and rivers with Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) using Landsat 9 satellite images in the period of 1984-2022 was used to separate the water cover. The obtained results showed that there is a noticeable trend in reducing the water level in the desired points, which can be directly related to water harvesting for agricultural purposes in different parts of the route. In other words, the amount of water that the NDWI index shows in each station has a significant difference with other stations, which indicates significant water extraction in all parts of the Zayandeh-Rood. Therefore, in the present study, it was found that the normalized differential water index was easily able to extract water from satellite images and is a suitable index for predicting the condition of the Zayandeh-Rood Watershed