Abstract:
Over the last several years the Iraqi Province of Sulaimania has gone through significant changes. The purpose of this study is to highlight and understand major changes in land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) relates to the growing population and increased economic activity in the Province of Sulaimania, in northern Iraq between 1998 and 2010. Land use and land cover change (LULCC) can be driven by both natural and anthropogenic drivers, and these LULCC changes can impact the availability of products and services for the human population in the area, and can have deleterious effect on the region’s fauna and flora, as well as the environmental and ecological systems. Despite its rapid growth and increasing importance, LULCC studies in this tend to be limited and outdated. To address this issue, this work utilized a time-series of Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) satellite imagery data, covering the time frame between 1998, and 2010. Change
xviii
detection in land-use/land-cover was carried out using a workflow consisting of establishing the LULC classification scheme, image data acquisition, scene processing, data analysis, post-processing, and validation. In particular, classification and Regression Tree (CART) have been utilized to perform image classification based on the 1998 image, and Cross-Correlation Analysis (CCA) was used to identify changes between image pairs. Validation was carried out using a random stratified process by classes, and by comparing the results against Rapid Eye image date from 2011.
