Investigation of forest land use degradation due to dam construction using satellite images processing
Subject Areas : Remote sensing and biogeographyماندانا عزیزی 1 , محمد پناهنده 2
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Abstract :
Identify land uses and land use changes to investigate and monitor sensitive areas is essential for sustainable land planning and management. The main objective of this study is to investigate the land use changes caused by the construction of Shafarood Dam in the Hyrcanian forests in the north of Iran during a 17-year period using Landsat satellite imagery. To do this, three satellite imagery of the years 2000, 2013 and 2017 were used, and the corrections (geometric and atmospheric) were applied on the images and the map of the land use for each section in the region was prepared using the classification method of the maximum likelihood that the produced map have Kappa coefficient more than 86% and usage accuracy of 0.83. After classification, the comparison method was used to monitor the land use changes. The results revealed that in every three years, the most land cover of Shafarood watershed belongs to the forest class and in the next rank belongs to the rangeland class. As a result, the continuous decline of the forest class accured from 63.05 percent to 57.27 and 57.22 percent in the first section for the years 2013 and 2017 respectively. The continuous increase of the rock class (8.15-9.10-10.45) and bare lands (3.5- 4.47-5.08%) confirms it in the study area. Environmental challenges of constructing the Shafaroud dam is another emphasis on the importance of conducting advanced and specialized studies based on ecological methodologies and also increasing the decision makers awareness of Hyrcanian forests complexity which has formed in a very long-time period.
