Studying the process of agricultural land use changes in Shahriar twonship using remote sensing and GIS

Agricultural lands are valuable and limited resources so the importance of preserving and maintaining such lands is necessary due to the importance of agricultural products, economic aspect, and to meet the population's livelihood needs. In this regard, one of the most important challenges of the last century in the field of agricultural lands is the land use changes in the productive agricultural lands, which, in addition to numerous environmental problems, such as the destruction of fertile soils, vegetation, has the reduction of animal diversity. Today, with the aim of appropriate planning and successful implementation of programs, accurate and up-to-date information on the ratio of land uses and landscape of the field is needed, therefore, since remote sensing technology has a spatial and integrated view of the region and Geographic Information System has the analysis ability, modeling and preparation of land use maps can be effective in this regard. Therefore, the present research has conducted with the aim of studying the process of changes and transformation of agricultural lands in Shahryar county in the last 30 years using Remote Sensing technology (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In this research, Landsat satellite images and sensors (TM-ETM-TIRS) were used in the years 1989 to 2022 (4 periods) to analyze the information and prepare the agricultural land use map. The results showed that garden lands have decreased a lot in the last 30 years, and irrigated agricultural lands have increased, and the analysis of vegetation using the NDVI index showed the decreasing of the vegetation during the study years. Moreover, the climate change pattern showed decrease in rainfall and increase in the surface temperature of agricultural lands in the last 30 years which has faced the farmers with water shortage and reduction and unwillingness to do agricultural activities. According to the findings, it is evident that the trend of climate change, such as increasing temperature and decreasing rainfall, and agricultural land changes, have become a serious and concerning problem in this county, and it requires the implementation and presentation of new solutions and policies in order to develop and promote agricultural activities.