Comparison of Multi-Spectral Satellite Images of Spot5 and Sentinel 2 for Mapping of Rangeland Vegetation Covers Density in the Middle Kashkan Basing (Lorestan Province)

The values of rangeland vary, and there are significant temporal and spatial changes. Since rangeland are constantly changing, they play a crucial role in the economy and in the protecting the land and water. So it is crucial to grasp them and manage them properly. The middle "Kashkan" watershed in the "Lorestan" province was chosen in order to assess the capability of multi-spectral pictures from Sentinel 2 and Spot 5 satellites in creating rangeland density maps. Using ground control points and the region's digital height model, the photos were geometrically adjusted with an accuracy of less than 0.21 pixels. On the primary multispectral image of each satellite as well as the integrated image of Spot 5 and the rangeland density map, supervised classification utilizing the parallelepiped, minimum distance, maximum likelihood, and neural network classification techniques was carried out. Three density classes—5–25, 25–50, and 50% and above—were prepared for it. 117 ground control points were located on the topographic map of the area in question in order to measure the classification's accuracy. The global positioning system (GPS) was then used to pinpoint the locations of the points in the study area, and the ground reality map of the region was created using the determined coordinates. The Spot 5 image with PCA-3-1 band composition and a neural network classification algorithm, which had an overall accuracy of 70.53% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.65 compared to the Sentinel 2 image with PCA-8-2 band composition and a neural network classification algorithm, which had an overall accuracy of 65.72 and a Kappa coefficient of 0.08, produced better results, according to a study that examined the accuracy of classified images. This study showed that Spot 5 satellite photos outperform Sentinel 2 satellite images when creating rangeland coverage maps with three different densities. It is possible to use satellite images with spatial and spectral resolution suitable for creating a map of rangeland density and regulating and trying to prevent the destruction of rangeland in the west of the country over a certain period of time because the distances for aerial photography of rangeland areas in Iran are great.