Environmental Investigation of Bahar Al-Najaf Region Using Sentinel-2 Images

This study aims to shed light on the indicators of environmental change and environmental impact assessment during the past five years in a representative area of the western part of Iraq (BAHAR-ALNAJAF). This is to understand the leading causes that led to the environmental changes from (2016 to 2020) due to the change in land cover in the study area. The paper refers to an environmental study for the study area using satellite data within the software environment (ArcGIS) and the application of remote sensing from two aspects: Ecological indices retrieval and the monitoring environment for land cover. Remote sensing and GIS software have been utilized to categorize (Sentinel-2) imagery into seven land use and land cover (LULC) classes: cropland land, orchards land, wetland, sandy area land, mixed barren land, built-up land, and water bodies. Supervised classification and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), and Normalized Difference Salinity Index (NDSI) were approved and utilized respectively to retrieve its class boundary. From a practical point of view, it was found that there is a rise in water levels in the Bahar Al-Najaf; this rising has led to the flooding of many built-up and vegetated lands. As a result, flooded land areas increased in 2020 to about 50% more than in 2016. Consequently, the built-up growth regions in the study area were very slow to change during the study period (2016-2020). The vegetation cover for 2020 is 56% higher than in 2016 because of the abundance of water and agricultural policy of this year.