Investigation of Land use Change in Kasilian Watershed Using Multi-Temporal Images

Change detection is the process of identifying differences in the state of an object or phenomenon by observing it at different times. Soil and topography have long-term changes and can be considered static. However, changes in hydrological response of a watershed over a medium time scale depends on change in the type and distribution of vegetation cover. Over last 50 years, about 3700 floods have occurred in Iran that 53 percent of them have happened in 1992-2002 period due to population growth, change and over use of the land. In this research, MSS and LISSIII images of 1977 and 2007 related to Kasilian Watershed were used. After atmospheric corrections, different false color composites of both images were classified with maximum likelihood algorithm. The best kappa coefficient of both images were related to Green band, NDVI and Red band of false color composites as 0.81 and 0.84, respectively. The results showed that over the 30 year study period; about 251.94 hectare of forest area has been decreased.