Journal of Environmental Studies

Journal of Environmental Studies

Environmental Change Detection of Wetlands and Protected Areas Using Multi Temporal Images of TM Sensor (Case Study: Neyriz Wetland, Iran)

Authors
yusef Rafii
bahram Malekmohammadi
aliakbar Abkar
ahmadreza Yavari
majid Ramezani Mehrian
hamid Zohrabi
Abstract
Wetlands, national parks and wildlife refuges are the most important ecological capitals, so inform of their change has main role in quality of management of such area. Having new information of their changes helps us to find causes of changes and plans and policies that needed. Remote sensing data are one of the most important and best sources for changes monitoring especially in environment. In this paper Bakhtegan national park and wildlife refuge that contain Neyriz wetland, in the east Shiraz, Fars province, has been studied. This wetland is completely dry today and environmentalist knows human activities such as construction of Sivand and Mollasadra Dams and Recent droughts as the main reasons of that. To find wetland changes between 1998 to 2009 best methods of image processing was used. We use TM image of Landsat satellite to find changes in Bakhtegan national park and wildlife refuge. A maximum likelihood classification was used to classify the images. The results present the overall accuracy of 91.67% for 1998 and 92.36% for 2009. Also image processing show increase of salt surface about 129% and decrease of water surface about 53% as the most important changes of this region.
Keywords
Changes
Maximum Likelihood Classification
Multi temporal images
Neyriz Wetland
TM sensor