Monitoring Changes in Agricultural Land Area under Agroforestry Practices (A Case Study of Bagh-Baghoueiyeh in Jiroft)

Agroforestry systems have been introduced for sustainable development in response to the growing demand for food and the increasing need for proper exploitation of agricultural land. In the agroforestry system, rows of trees or shrubs established around farms create the microclimate conditions favorable to crop production. In this study, changes in the areas of cultivated land under an agroforestry system in Jiroft Plain, Iran, were studied using Landsat satellite images taken over a period of 22 years. For this purpose, the supervised classification method was used to identify two categories of land cover including cultivated land and bare land via Landsat TM sensor images as well as three categories of land cover including cultivated land, tree cover, and bare land via Landsat 8 images. The land cover changes over the 22-year study period were subsequently analyzed using the post-classification approach. Results revealed that windbreaks had been planted over 5.1% of the bare land and 15.4% of the agricultural land while 26.9% of the bare land had been transformed into farmland such that the area of agricultural land had risen from 556 ha in 1992 to 741 ha in 2014. Our findings indicate that proper management of the agroforestry system in the study area has led to the creation of conditions favorable to enhanced crop production. In order to make the most of the agroforestry system, high spatial resolution images should be used as tools toward determining the best tree species for use as windbreak and the best direction for their establishment both to achieve land conservation objectives and to create the conditions required for improved crop production.