Agricultural policy effects on land cover and land use over 30 years in Tartous, Syria, as seen in Landsat imagery

Abstract

This study pursues a connection between agricultural policy and the changes in land use and land cover detected with remote sensing satellite data. One part of the study analyzes the Syrian agricultural policy, wherein, certain regional targets have been selected for annual citrus or greenhouse development along with tools of enforcement, support, and monitoring. The second part of the study investigates the utility of remote sensing (RS) and geographical information systems (GIS) to map land use land cover changes (LULC-Cs) in a time series of images from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) from 1987, 1998, 2006, and 2010 and Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM+) from 1999 to 2002. Several multispectral band analyses have been performed to determine the most suitable band combinations for isolating greenhouses and citrus farms. Supervised classification with maximum likelihood classifier has been used to produce precise land use land cover map. This research demonstrates that spatial relationship between LULC-Cs and agricultural policies can be determined through a science-based GIS/RS application to a time series of satellite images taken at the same time of the implemented policy.