Land cover reflectance of Iraqi marshlands based on visible spectral multiband of satellite imagery

Abstract

The Iraqi marshlands in Mesopotamia are considered a major landmark of world heritage and a main feeding and rest destination for bird breeding. The marshes of Iraq have been subjected to intentional desiccation and desertification several times. Detecting the water content of major Iraqi marshlands is the main scope of this study. Satellite imagery can be employed to assemble the data required for water, vegetation and dry area evaluation in marshlands. The assessment was performed using the adaptive technology of supervised classification that depends on the shade of each object’s colour. Several types of Landsat satellite, MSS, TM, ETM+ and OLI/TIRS and 64 satellite images were used to fulfil the objective. Results show that the classification of visual variations is the most suitable economical approach to detecting various environmental changes amongst the common methods. The 48 years in the marshes of Iraq (1972–2020) can be represented in two main stages. The increasing tendency in the second stage is nearly double the decreasing tendency in the first stage. The surface area in the first stage deteriorated dramatically until it reached the lowest level of approximately 432 ​km2 in 2000 due to water encroachment and desiccation. Then, the area started to increase over time to approximately 4335 ​km2 in the second stage towards the year 2020, except for sudden declines in 2015 and 2018. The average water surface for the first and second stages were 1877 and 2012 ​km2, respectively.

Keywords

• Iraqi marshlands
• Land degradation
• Spectral reflectance analysis
• Tigris–euphrates