Remote sensing techniques and GIS for monitoring and environmental variations of land in Southern Iraq

Remote sensing (RS) techniques are intensively used for monitoring and mapping the land use and land cover. The integration between spatial and temporal capabilities of remote sensing applications with the spatial capacity of geographical information system (GIS) can be exploited as a powerful tool to manage and assess the land use and land cover of earth’s surface. These techniques can be used for mapping land use land cover (LULC) and to detect, plan, and manage environmental variations on Al-Najaf city southern of Iraq as depending on an attempt to track changes in satellite images over the years 2007-2011 and 2011-2018 based on Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 8 (OLI) data. Supervised classification with the Maximum Likelihood Classifier (MLC) used to classify environmental variations in the study area. There are six types of ground cover were identified as the wet land, water bodies, vegetation, urban areas, bare land and agriculture. The urban areas, water bodies, vegetation and wet land results have increased by 21.16% (191.82km2), 7.75% (70.26km2), 6.95% (62.98km2) and 0.05% (0.49 km2) respectively. While bare land and agriculture have decreased by-26.95% (-244.35km2) and -8.95% (-81.17km2) respectively. The overall accuracy on satellite images during years 2007, 2011 and 2018 are as 77.78%, 94.4% and 92.2% with a Kappa coefficient as 0.73, 0.93 and 0.90 respectively. There are fundamental changes, which were observed in LULC between satellite images in 2007 and 2018.The accuracy results on the satellite images during years 2011 and 2018 were significantly better and higher than the values in 2007 images.