Land use and land cover changes due to human activities in a time sequence. Detection of such changes may help decision makers and planners to understand the factors in land use and land cover change in order to take effective and useful measures. Remote sensing and GIS techniques may be used as efficient tools to detect and assess land use change.
In recent years, a considerable land use change has occurred in the greater Zanjan area. In order to understand the type and rate of changes in this area, Landsat TM, ETM+ images captured in 1989 and 2008 have been selected for comparison. The results of the present study disclose that about 35 percents of the total area changed their land use.
In order to evaluate land use changes in this area, the Environmental Impact Index are established into four different categories as: Very high, High, Medium and Low impacts. The proposed index shows that the highest impact has been generated due to changing agricultural and bare lands into urban use.
