Investigation of the effect of Sarpole-Zahab earthquake on vegetation area and evaluation of vegetation recovery rate

Studying the extent of resource changes in the past years and assessing and predicting these changes in the coming years can be an important step in environmental planning, land preparation and sustainable development in the future. The catastrophic earthquake at the Sarpole-Zahab occurred on November 21, 2006 in Kermanshah province. This earthquake has caused changes in land cover and consequently changes in natural vegetation and rangelands of the region, in addition to life and infrastructure damage. It is usually difficult and limited to study and monitor vegetation on a global scale and areas of access to field or field data. It is also time-consuming to estimate vegetation in a conventional way that includes an overall estimate of vegetation and does not provide very accurate information. Therefore, remote sensing is a very useful technology that has features such as providing a wide and integrated view of an area, repeatability, easy access to information, high accuracy of information obtained and time saving over other methods. Is preferred. Therefore, satellite data is one of the most effective tools in the field of rangeland and vegetation science. Vegetation indices such as NDVI as well as SAVI soil effect modifier vegetation index were calculated from the VRR vegetation improvement index to evaluate the effect of earthquake on vegetation area and to evaluate natural vegetation recovery rate. The natural recovery rate of VRR plants for the year after the earthquake was 40% for the study area using NDVI index and 39% using SAVI index.