Abstract

The main objective of this study is to find out the loss of forest area through analyzing it in different periods. In general, deforestation can be regarded as one of the most important elements in LULC and the scenario of global changes is taking place around the world. Therefore, it is worth assessing its trend and the rate at which it is taking place now. These changes will play a significant role in bringing about some changes in regional climate and accordingly on biodiversity. The loss of forest in Iran is going on since 1960 onwards in the Neka river Basin. The estimation of forest loss was not reported to be done by using Satellite data. The changes occurring in forest cover were reported by a series of four satellite images in different time intervals by using Remote Sensing (RS) and GIS such as Land satMSS of 1977, Land satTM of1987, ETM 2001 and ETM+ 2006. The forest covers were analyzed and maps from four temporal satellite datasets were prepared. Based on 1977, 1987, 2001 and 2006 satellite data interpretation, the forest cover was converted to geospatial database. According to the results obtained from these images, there was a decrease in forest area (7096.63), productive forest area, as well as degraded forest area. However, the total forest area showed a decrease in the first period (1977-1987) although an increase was reported again during the second period (1987-2001) to 2418.82 hectares (3.5% of the study area), this trend continued even between 2001-2006 and the mixed forest cover increased by856.08 hectares (1.31%). This increase was due to few hectares of mixed forest area was converted into manmade forest.

Keywords:

Deforestation, Iran, land use, Neka basin, remote sensing,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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The authors have no competing interests.