Barren Land Index to Assessment Land Use-Land Cover Changes in Himreen Lake and Surrounding Area East of Iraq

Abstract

The study area lies in the eastern part of Iraq, within Diyala and small parts of Salah Al-Din and Sulamanyah Governorates. The eastern boundary of the map represents Iraqi-Iranian International borders; it covers about (7010) Km².

The present study depends on two scenes of Thematic Mapper (TM5) data of Landsat, these data are subset by using area of interest (AOI) file and made use of a nearest neighbor polynomial correction within the ERDAS 9.2 software. The images carried out with WGS84 datum and UTM N38 projection using nearest neighbor resampling.

Barren Land Index (BLI) was adopted as a practical tool for study and assessment the changes in Himreen lake and surrounding area.

The obtained result showed the distributions of Land use - Land cover classes in the study area for the years 1976-1992-2010 and the change which occurred in the periods (1976-1992) and (1992-2010) represented by bare soil and salt flat classes, mixed barren land class, exposed rocks and sandy area classes.

Keywords: Land use - Land cover (LULC), Image processing, Thresholding, Barren Land Index (BLI), Change detection.