Analyzing and Evaluating the Agricultural and Garden Land Areas, and the Land Use Changes using RS and GIS Technology

Estimating and determining the area under cultivation of agricultural products are among the important aspects in planning and decisions making. Remote sensing data can provide useful information in this regard to agricultural experts by identifying the type and determining the crop area. In this research, agricultural land and garden areas as well as the land use changes were evaluated by using Quickbird and Landsat images for 1984, 2003 and 2015 in Rudasht basin of Esfahan. The required preprocessing was done on the images and then, the educational samples were taken using GPS for classification by the maximum likelihood method and verifying the classification. The geometric correction results for 1984 and 2003 images with acceptable RMSE were 0.48 and 0.42 respectively. The image classification results of Landsat showed that the agricultural land and gardens areas are reduced by 1036.236 and 27.3146 hectares from 1984 to 2015, and Quickbird images showed the reduction of 1036.236 and 119.8833 hectares from 2003 to 2015. In estimating the Quickbird classification error for 2003 and 2015, the Kappa coefficient of maximum likelihood was 0.8576 and 0.8643 and for the years 1984 and 2015 were 0.7967 and 0.8641 respectively.