Monitoring LULC changes and its impact on the LST and NDVI in District 1 of Shiraz City

Abstract

Today, immediate and long-term change detection and monitoring using remote sensing (RS) data and geographical information system (GIS) is of paramount importance in generating information about the latest land use/land cover (LULC), land surface temperature (LST), and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) in accordance with spatial and temporal changes. Therefore, to obtain these components, a multi-temporal dataset was used consisting of two sets of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images from 1986 to 2011 period across District 1 of Shiraz. Additionally, to investigate the relationship between LST and NDVI over seasons, four Landsat images were used. LULC, LST, and NDVI components were retrieved using Landsat image in ERDAS IMAGINE 9.2 image processing software. Results showed that during the study period, the city had experienced a massive urban (residential) growth. Moreover, change detection suggested that residential areas had increased by 13.17 km2 and vegetation zones (garden) and barren lands had decreased by 4.6 and 8.63 km2, respectively, during 1985–2011 period. The study of the relationship between vegetation index (land cover) and vegetation (land use) in District 1 showed that with reduced vegetation zone (land use), the quality of vegetation (land cover) had deteriorated. These findings indicate that reduced quality of vegetation cover and consequently its Reduction can have a positive effect on the temperature patterns. In general, the negative correlation between vegetation and LST caused by lower vegetation quality was less significant in 2011 compared to 1986, while there the correlation between vegetation and LST in summer was higher than other seasons.