Assessing land cover/use changes in Karbala city (Iraq) using GIS techniques and remote sensing data

Abstract

In this research, land cover changes between 2000 to 2017 were studied in Karbala city (Iraq) using geographic information system techniques and remote sensing data. Satellite imagery data -Landsat7 (2000) and Landsat 8 (2017) - were processed using the supervised maximum likelihood algorithm, and the post-classification comparison method in QGIS 2.14. Four land cover categories, namely, built-up, vegetation, water, and soil have been specified to produce land cover maps for each acquisition date. The overall accuracies were 99.99% (2000), and 99.98% (2017) with Kappa statistics of 0.99, and 0.99. The evaluation of land cover changes shows that built-up, vegetation and soil have been increased by 1.9% (93.5 km2), 0.4% (20.8 km2) and 4.4% (221.3 km2) while water land has a shrink by 6.7% (335.6 km2) respectively. These changes conclude a serious threat to water land which it effects on population growth, human activities and agricultural activities in the study area.