Dynamics of Land Use and Land Cover Change Using Geospatial Techniques – A Case Study of Baghdad, Iraq

Abstract

Urban land-cover change is increasing dramatically in most emerging countries. In Iraq and in the capital city (Baghdad). Active socioeconomic progress and political stability have pushed the urban border into the countryside at the cost of natural ecosystems at ever-growing rates. Widely used classifier of Maximum Likelihood was used for classification of 2003 and 2021 Landsat images. This classifier achieved 83.20% and 99.58% overall accuracies for 2003 and 2021 scenes, respectively. This study found that the urban area decreases by 16.4% and the agriculture area decrease by 5.4% over the period. On the other hand, barren land has been expanded up to more than 7% as well as increasing in water land that should probably due to flooding (almost 15% more than 2003). To reduce the undesirable effects of land-cover changes over urban ecosystems in Baghdad and in the municipality in specific, it is suggested that Baghdad develops an urban development policy. The emphasis of policy must be the maintenance an acceptable balance among urban infrastructure development, ecological sustainability and agricultural production.