The phenomenon of urban sprawl can be observed in developing countries those characterized by rapid population growth and high economic activity like Iraq. Al-Karkh, as a case study, is the western part of Baghdad city, the capital of Iraq typified by high rate of the urban expansion throughout the last decades. The aim of the current study is to monitor and model the urban sprawl in Al-Karkh, and to detect the land cover land use (LCLU) changes in the study area for 33 years, a span from 1984 to 2017. For those purposes, five Landsat satellites ETM+ and TM images were freely downloaded from glovis.esgs.gov and used in this study. The ERDAS Imagine 2014, ERDAS ER-Mapper 2014, ArcGIS 10.4 and ENVI 5.3 were utilized to perform the image processing and GIS analyses. The supervised image classification, Normalized Difference Built-Up Index (NDBI) were utilized to depict the urban sprawl, while the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) was employed to produce the vegetation cover images during the study span. The change detection analyses showed that built-up areas have been increased from 16% to 57%, and the agricultural lands were decreased from 32% to 16% throughout the study span. This study concluded that Al-Karkh area had a high urbanization rate (38 km2/year) for the period from 1984 to 2017. Additionally, the results revealed that the supervised classification is an accurate technique to detect the urban sprawl, whereas the calculated accuracy assessment was ranged between 89-95% for the classified study area images.
Volume 11 | 06-Special Issue
Pages: 1691-1698