Land Cover Change Detection in Al-Karkh / Baghdad

Halah Qahtan Hamdy, Osamah Hadi Mutlag

Abstract: This paper focuses on the environmental change monitoring in all areas of West Tigris (Al_ Karkh), the current study highlights the spatial and temporal changes detection in land cover for Al-Karkh using different analyses methods the supervised maximum likelihood classification method, the normalized difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Remote Sensing (RS). Techniques spectral indices were used in this study to determine the change of vegetation, urban and water area, through analyses Landsat images for different two years (2000, 2017). Different change detection techniques were applied to monitor the changes. The change analysis based on two dates, spanning over a period of two years using supervised classification, NDVI, NDWI and NDBI, showed a decreasing trend (1.607 %) in vegetated areas, increase (2.567 %) in water bodies, increase (2.928 %) in urban areas

Keywords: Classification, Vegetation index, GIS, Remote sensing