Examining temporal changes in relations between land uses and land use capabilities in south of sanliurfa plains

Abstract

Today, the Earth’s land pattern can be examined by the detectors on satellite sensors periodically and the variations on these patterns can be detected in a short while. Monitoring of land cover changes and planning these lands effectively are the important issues for economic and ecological sustainability. In this study, the land cover changes of Suruç, Akcakale, Ceylanpinar and Harran plains have been investigated between 1985 and 2016. Accordingly, we utilized Landsat satellite images for three different dates of their summer recordings. Satellite images were classified by the segmentation process and supervised classification through Maximum Likelihood technique. The land use maps obtained from the analysis consist of four classes: dry farming, irrigated farming, grassland and settlement. In addition, accuracy assessment has been implemented on each classified map in order to assess the degree of robustness of our analysis. According to our results, we obtain 85% of overall accuracy where the Kappa value is about 80%. Our results show that significant changes occurred in the land cover of southern plains of Sanliurfa. These changes occurred in the form of transforming dry farming areas to irrigated farming areas in Akcakale and Ceylanpinar whereas irrigated farming were transforming to dry farming in Suruc, during the period of 1985 to 2016.