Change detection in city of Hilla during period of 2007-2015 using Remote Sensing Techniques

Abstract

This study was carried out in order to identify and map the temporal changes in the land covers in Hilla province using Remote Sensing and GIS. Two images were used of land sate taken in Quick Bird Satellite acquired for the ETM sensor taken on 15 April 2015 and 15 April 2007 with spatial accuracy (0.6 m). These were used as reference sources in the selection of some classification samples after matching them with the Landsat 8 above. In this research using topography maps of the study area (Hilla) with scale 1/10000 generated from the General Authority as a reference data and achieved compatibility with the image of space after it was corrected geometrically 1976, 2000 and 2014. In this research using Geographic Information System (GIS) software with projection images WGS84 process (based on the projection of the global map and the global geodetic system) and within the 38th north. Supervised classification was used to identify land cover classes dominated in the study area. Change detection results showed an increase in the urban areas, in the year 2015 the area had become 1380.350-hectare unit, while in the year 2007 the area was 318.562-hectare unit. Similarly, the vegetation had increased between 2007-2015 from (132.531 to 507.296) hectare unit. Results indicated that urban land and salinization process can be considered as the important phenomena which positively affected the agriculture area. So, the increase in the cover of water is an important reason of decrease in the arid land, which was due to the increase of urban land reach to 1061.788-hectare unit. Many changes have happened in the quantity of reclaimed land in these arid lands between the two years (2007 and 2015).