Study of vegetation and water covers changes in the district of Ramadi by using remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems( GIS) technologies.

Abstract

This research aims at monitoring changes in vegetation and water covers in the district of Ramadi, for the period 1990 - 2010, by using the technologies of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).The researcher made use of three Satellite images for three years1990-2001 -2010 of the types TM, ETM +, for winter seasons of these years. For the purpose of land cover classification, several steps have been carried out namely: A field work has been done to identify the type of land cover, for many locations of the area under study , and determine its coordinates using a (GPS). Application of Supervised Classification was applied to the search area, as well as the equation of manual vegetation NDVI was used to detect changes in vegetation cover and its density. The results indicate that ; the area of water cover was 636 km ² in 1990, decreased to 463 km ² in 2001, and then to 355 km ² in 2010. The vegetation cover has been an area of 282 km ² in 1990, increased to 387 km ² in the year 2001, while becoming an area of 327 km ² in 2010.This was the result of the conditions of foreign occupation of Iraq and the drought conditions of the the region.