Analysis of Landscape Pattern Changes in Isfahan City during the Last Two Decades

Abstract

Urbanization and urban land-use transition are a global concern and one of the greatest challenges for ensuring human welfare. The landscape patterns resulting from urbanization influence processes at local, regional, and global scales. Quantifying the spatio-temporal pattern of urbanization is important for understanding its ecological impacts and can provide basic information for appropriate decision-making. The main goal of this study was to quantify the changes of landscape patterns in Isfahan city, in Iran, during the last two decades. For monitoring spatial pattern changes, land use and land-cover maps of the area were prepared using supervised maximum likelihood classification of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images taken in 1990 and 2010. Five classes of land use including Water, Agricultural land, Urban area, Undeveloped area, and Bare land were identified. The changes of landscape structure were analyzed using several landscape metrics including: Percentage of landscape (PLAND), Number of patches (NP), Largest Patch Index (LPI) and Contagion (CONTAG), which were derived from spatial analysis software FRAGSTATS. The results indicated that the proportion of undeveloped area decreased from 41.87% to 39.65% and proportion of urban areas was significantly increased from 9.88% to 28.73% during the last two decades, mainly due to reduced agricultural area in Isfahan.