Assessment Environmental Changes in Al-Habbaniya Lake and Surrounding Areas in the Central Part of Iraq

Abstract

The study area lies in the central part of Iraq, in Al-Anbar Governorate, it covers about (4400) km².It includes Al-Habbinya Lake which represent touristic region and waterish reserves used for water balance management of Euphrates River.

The present study depends on Thematic Mapper (TM) data of Landsat 5 acquisition in 1990, Enhancement Thematic Mapper (ETM) data of Landsat7 acquisition in 2001, these data are mosaic and subset it 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.

Types of image ratioing were adopted as practical tools for monitoring of Al-Habbinya Lake and surrounding areas such as Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI), Water Index (WI) and Salinity Index (SI) to study environmental changes from 1990 to 2001, by using ERDAS 9.2 Imagine and Arc GIS 9.3 programs.

The vegetation distribution determined by Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI), Water determined by using Water Index and to detect the salinity soil used Salinity Index (SI).

The obtained result shows increase in area of vegetation, and decrease in area of water, salty soil and sabkha during the period from 1990 to 2001.

Keywords: Environmental Changes, Image Ratioing, Thresholding, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Water Index (WI), Salinity Index (SI)