Change detection on land use/land cover and land surface temperature using spatiotemporal data of Landsat: a case study of Gaza Strip

Human and natural activities are considered one of several factors that lead to global environmental changes. Urbanization and population growth are the most prevailing issues facing scientists around the world which further affect the environment and temperature. According to statistics, the population in Gaza Strip, a small and besieged area, will be over 2.4 million and the land demands will exceed the sustainable capacity of land use by 2023. In this study, geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) techniques were applied to estimate temporal change detection of land use/land cover (LULC) and land surface temperature (LST) for Gaza Strip between 2000 and 2017 and to indicate the relationship between land changes and demography changes and LST in the same period. In this study, two kinds of pixel-based classifiers, i.e., maximum likelihood (ML) and support vector machine (SVM), have been performed to extract LULC changes. While for LST, it was calculated by using Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Surface Emissivity equations. The results show clear decrease between 2000 and 2017 in bare land (67.19%) compared to an increase in urban (13.12%) and crop and vegetation (4.95%). Furthermore, the increase in population is directly proportional to the increase in urban area through this period. In addition to that, LST in bare lands has the highest temperature in July and September (summer, autumn) and the lowest in January (winter) due to seasonal effects.