Evaluation and Analysis of land Use Changes Using Remote Sensing and GIS Technologies with an Emphasis on Water Requirements of Plants

The increase in population has intensified the process of land use in different parts of the world. The purpose of the present research was to investigate the changes in the use of irrigated and rainfed cultivation with an emphasis on the water needs of plants in the Sarab Plain located in East Azarbaijan Province, Iran. Based on this, in order to discover the changes created in the study area, the images of TM, ETM and OLI sensors of Landsat satellite in 1996, 2005 and 2021 were processed and classified after geometric and atmospheric corrections. Using the overall accuracy test and Kappa statistic, the accuracy of production maps was determined. The classification results showed that the Support vector machine method has a higher accuracy than the neural network method with an average total accuracy of 93.37% and an average kappa of 91.33%. During the years of 1996-2021, the area of irrigated cultivation increased by 24.2% and the area of rainfed cultivation decreased by 2.7%. Moreover, the volume of water required for the five major products of the region was calculated using Cropwat software and it was found that the volume of water consumption has increased in the period of 1996-2021.