Abstract

Land use change has transformed a vast part of the natural landscapes of the developing world for the last 50 years. Land is a fundamental factor of production and through much of the course of human history; it has been tightly coupled with economic growth. Bare soil has recently increased and it is one of the most important land degradation processes in the Mediterranean basins. The land use has changed rapidly within and near Neka River which is a fast growing agricultural river Basin.  The land use changes in this region were analyzed based on Landsat data from 1977 to 2001. Supervised/unsupervised classi?cation approach coupled with GIS analyses was employed to generate the change over land use/cover maps. In order to analyze landscape fragmentation, land-use change has been calculated using NDVI. Based on the results of the analysis, the range of NDVI has changed from 0.9597/-0.2876 in 1977 to 0.6420/-0.187 in 2001 which shows that bare land has increased, while woodland areas decreased.

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