Evaluation of Trend of Land utilization and Population Growth Using Remote Sensing Data: Case Study of Yazd City, Iran

Abstract

Detection of changes is one of the fundamental requirements in the management and evaluation of urban areas. Various methods have been proposed to detect changes and land cover developments. The purpose of this study was to study land use changes in the Yazd area using Landsat 5 satellite imagery, TM, MSS and ETM+ images for the period of 1987-2012. For this purpose, the images were first corrected geometrically using appropriate algorithms. After determining the educational samples, two images of the vegetation of the study area were prepared using the supervised classification method. In the next step, the mapping of the changes was made by comparing the overlapping maps using the comparative method. The results indicate that land cover has changed during this time period. The main reason for these changes is population growth, changing social, economic and industrial conditions in Yazd.