جامعة الكوت - University of kut - بحوث

السنة	عنوان البحث	نشر البحث
2018	Change Detection for Some Land Cover Types of Wasit Province (Eastern Iraq) Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques for Years 1989 -2017 *Address for Correspondence	Indian Journal of Natural Sciences
This is an Open Access Journal / article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. All rights reserved. In recent years, the study of land cover and their changes by remote sensing and GIS techniques has become a key subject in planning, management and local / global environmental change studies.In this paper, remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) are integrated to monitor, map, and quantify the main land cover types (vegetation, water and salinity covers) in the eastern part of Iraq (Wasit Province was taken as a case study), covering about 17753 km 2 between longitude 43°18'E-44°33'E, and latitude 31°39'N-33°10'N.The research aimed to use remote sensing techniques and digital image processing of Landsat images (TM) depending on the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and Salinity Index (SI) to calculate the areas of vegetation, water and salinity relative to the total area of Wasit province. Moreover, to detect the changes of these three types of land cover for preceding three years 1989, 2002, 2017. The cartographic representation of all data was performed by ArcGIS10.5 software.The study concluded the importance of water cover in the changes of vegetation and the salinity covers area. As it showed that the drying of most important marshes such as Al-Damlaj, Al-Saadiya, Al-Showeja, Al-Shobicha and other small swamps between the period 1989-2002 played an important role in reducing the area of water and vegetation cover and increasing the salinity, especially in the SouthWestern part of the study area. The process of rehabilitating and refilling these marshes for the period 2003-2017 has effectively contributed ABSTRACT RESEARCH ARTICLE 15360 to increase water and vegetation cover areas in the study area. Additionally, the results of the comparison showed that the declination of vegetation cover and increment of salinity cover in 2017 compared with 1989 is due to urbanization expansion, especially in the Eastern and NorthEastern parts of the study area.