Analyzing Land Use/Land Cover Change Using Remote Sensing and GIS in Mosul District, Iraq

Abstract

This study aims investigating land use/land cover changes occurred in in Mosul District, Iraq between 2013 and 2020 using remote sensing and GIS. Comparing, two NDVI statistics shows that the most important changes have occurred in low and medium density classes for both periods.The category of low NDVI density has increased from 0.24% in 2013 to about 8.53% in 2020. While the category of medium NDVI density has decreased from 96.40% in 2013 to 88.48% in 2020. Due to the agriculture management and water allocation strategies. Moreover, supervised classification of Landsat 8 OLI images has been employed using maximum likelihood technique. Comparing between the classified images indicate that a considerable increase in rocks cover from 0.25% in 2013 to 2.23% in 2020. The second major category of land in the study area is grassland cover which has increased from 25.80% in 2013 to 39.99% in 2020. Accuracy of the classification has been assessed based on the overall classification accuracy and Kappa coefficient. Thus, the present study illustrates that remote sensing and GIS are important technologies for temporal analysis and quantification of spatial phenomena which is otherwise not possible to attempt through conventional mapping techniques.