Spatiotemporal Analysis of the Development Status of Al-Hammar Marsh in Southern of Iraq Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

Abstract

The marshes of Mesopotamia at the southern part of Iraq represent a unique component of our global heritage. During the last decades the Iraqi marshes subjected to many changes, these changes have great impact on marshes environmental and ecosystem. One of these marshes is Al-Hammar marsh, the study area of this research and it located in Thi Qar city in Iraq. It was influenced by many causes such as dams constructed on the Iraqi rivers Tigris and Euphrates while they were passing through Turkey and Syria which reduced the amount of water in the area, and also there are some other political effects which caused the deterioration on the study area.  The aims of this study is to use GIS  to analyze the spatiotemporal to detect the changes  of the study area using Landsat images in different times applying Maximum Likelihood classification method. The results of this study shows the changes for four classes; water, vegetation, bare land, and wetland. The important classes in this study are water and vegetation. The vegetation area already has covered a lot of the water area, that's mean so much amount of water was disappeared under the vegetation. So that, the water class in the classified images is not the same in the reality. The water areas in 2003 had lost around 85% compare with the water areas in 1991. The study area in 2015 has re-immersed around 67% of water areas compare with the of water areas in 2003. The accuracy of all the results are accepted.