Land Use Change Detection of Maraghe City and Its Implication for Agricultural Area and the Orchards by Using the Multi-Temporal Satellite Imagery

Urban growth is one of the complex behaviors which the cities show over passing time and in order to meet the needs of living spaces, working spaces, shopping areas, etc. of its residents. Sometimes this behavior is in contrast with agricultural areas and it causes destruction of this areas. Maraghe is one of the cities whose urban growth process has been in contrast to agricultural areas and this contrast has caused the destruction of agricultural areas and orchards at the price of urban built-up areas. At this paper, the changes of agricultural areas and especially the orchards of Maraghe to built-up areas have been shown between 1984-2011 by using the Landsat TM & ETM­+ imagery and GIS. Thus, the images have been classified using Fuzzy ARTMAP method and consequently the process of land use changes have been extracted by utilization of Cross correlation. The results of paper show that about 591 hectares of agricultural areas has been changed to built-up areas in the period of 1984-2011 (hence 45 percent of entire land use changes); 207 hectares of agricultural areas and 16 percent of entire changes to built-up areas consists of orchards. In addition to having ecological effects, Maraghe orchards are one of the indicators of the urban landscape and identity.

:Land use change, city of Maraghe, agricultural areas, RS & GIS