ANALYZING LAND USE AND LAND COVER CHANGES IN URBAN ENVIRONMENT OF SHIRAZ CITY, IRAN FOR THE PERIOD OF 1987 2016.

Application of remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS) is a detailed and elegant procedure for land cover classification and detecting changes in the classified land use. We utilized Landsat images to classify land cover / land use of Shiraz city for the 1987-2016 period. Dynamic of this classification was then assessed by detecting land use-land cover change (LULCC) in the obtained maps. Some appropriate statistical tests were performed to ensure that the results are significant. The city of Shiraz with the area of 50160 ha (501.6 km2), was firstly classified into three land cover types including, barren lands, built up area and vegetation. For the year 1987, 77.5%, 11.8% and 10.7% of the city were associated to these three land covers, respectively. These three statistics have changed to 55.4%, 36.8% and 7.8% in 2016 inferring about 210% increase in the built up area as compared to the base year of 1987. The vegetation and barren areas have reduced by about 26% and 29% during the study period, respectively. The observed rapid growth in built up area is counterbalanced by sharp decrease in the vegetated and barren land covers. Our findings suggest that, from environmental points of view such as access to fresh water and vegetated lands, living conditions in Shiraz city have been deteriorated.