Analysis of the land use degree of Mary Oasis, Turkmenistan using remote sensing and GIS

Abstract

Land use is the main form of human activities which has profoundly changed the natural geographical environment,and its direct result is the situation of land cover change.The degree of land use not only reflects the natural attributes of soil, and also the combined effect of human and natural factors. This paper takes Mary Oasis, Turkmenistan, as the study area to establish a land use degree index model. We used two remote sensing images which are in the same phase and SVM method for land use classification, and gave the corresponding properties of each type of land use. Sampling in the study area based on regular hexagonal grids, area land use degree index in each grid cell is calculated by GIS. We made the index interpolation and the land use degree forecast for the entire study area using Kriging Method, divided the whole area into five levels, and analyzed the land use degree of Mary Oasis. It concluded:(1) grassland, arable land and abandoned land are the main available land use types in the study area, and they account for about 50%, but have a decreasing trend totally;(2) the zonal distribution of land use degree of the study area is from the center to the periphery, and the contour 0.5 of land use degree is about the boundary of oasis and desert of the study area;(3) the area of middle and higher land use degree of the study area reduce at the rate of 0.079% per annum, the area ratio of main oasis and desert also reduced from 45.14:54.86 in 2001 to 42.06:57.94 in 2010, indicating that the ecological environment of the study area has a trend of deterioration;(4) the self-transfer rates of low, moderate and high land use degree are all greater than 80%, while the self-transfer rates of slightly low and middle land use degree are around 50%. We got the spatial distribution and inter-annual change of the land use degree of Mary Oasis. And this work has a guiding significance for social development and the protection of the ecological environment of the study area, and has a certain referential significance for the future relevant research on the technical processes and methods.