Abstract
The Ourika watershed, located in the North-West of Moroccan High Atlas, has undergone several spatio-temporal changes and accelerated land use dynamics as a result of the interaction of climatic, topographic and anthropogenic factors. The objective of this study is to monitor the evolution of land use in the study area over the past 33 years. Landsat satellite imagery has been chosen for land cover mapping, providing a sufficient detail to identify land cover characteristics while providing more or less complete coverage of the area of action. Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper satellite images from 1987 and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager from 2019 were used, with a spatial resolution of 30m. The images were treated and classified using Support Vector Machine algorithm (SVM) implemented on QGIS Geographic Information System software. The classification evaluation shows a Kappa coefficient of 85% and 84% and an overall accuracy of 95% and 94% for 1987 and 2019 respectively. Furthermore, the results showed a 10% decrease in the forest as well as a significant increase in the pasture, arboriculture, bare land and buildings with a respective percentage of 5.99%, 1.67%, 1.48% and 1.37% accordingly.
Highlights
Watersheds are characterized by an accelerated dynamic of land use in Morocco [1] because of several factors that interact to give them a role that is not limited to traditional drainage, storage and water transfer operations, but goes far beyond it to constitute living basins sheltering multiple human activities and territories subject to extreme and unusual natural phenomena
Natural ecosystems are subject to the pressure of several unfavorable factors, mainly anthropogenic and climatic
LANDSAT satellite imagery has been chosen for land cover mapping, providing a sufficient level of detail to identify land cover characteristics while providing complete coverage of the area of action for different periods
Summary
Watersheds are characterized by an accelerated dynamic of land use in Morocco [1] because of several factors that interact to give them a role that is not limited to traditional drainage, storage and water transfer operations, but goes far beyond it to constitute living basins sheltering multiple human activities and territories subject to extreme and unusual natural phenomena.Natural ecosystems are subject to the pressure of several unfavorable factors, mainly anthropogenic and climatic. Watersheds are characterized by an accelerated dynamic of land use in Morocco [1] because of several factors that interact to give them a role that is not limited to traditional drainage, storage and water transfer operations, but goes far beyond it to constitute living basins sheltering multiple human activities and territories subject to extreme and unusual natural phenomena. The study of the land use dynamic is necessary. In this context, the land use mapping and its evolution over time is a fundamental tool to improve our knowledge of the dynamics of forest, agricultural and other areas. LANDSAT satellite imagery has been chosen for land cover mapping, providing a sufficient level of detail to identify land cover characteristics while providing complete coverage of the area of action for different periods
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