Land Use Land Cover Change in Zakho District, Kurdistan Region, Iraq: Past, Current and Future

Past and current status of the land is significant for productive environmental management. This can especially be observable in regions that are affected by climate variability and human activities such as Zakho district. The present study illustrates the spatio-temporal dynamics of land use/cover (LUC) in Zakho district, Kurdistan Region-Iraq. Moreover, an attempt is made to predict LUC of the study area for year 2050. Landsat satellite imageries of two different time periods, i.e., Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) of 1989 and Landsat Operational Land Imager (OLI) of 2014 were acquired and the changes in Zakho over a period of 25 years were quantified. Maximum Likelihood Algorithm is used to classify the satellite image. The satellite images were classified into 8 classes namely dense forest, sparse forest, grass, rock, soil, crop, built-up and water body. The results showed that during the last 25 years, build-up land has been increased from 9 km
²
(1989) to 47 km
²
(2014). Crops, rocks and water body lands have been increased as well by about 97 km
²
, 16 km
²
, and 4 km
²
respectively. In other hand, dense forest, spare forest, grass and soil lands have been decreased by 93 km
²
, 9 km
²
, 52 km
²
, and 1 km
²
, respectively. In addition, the major transformed LUC for the year 2050 was soil by 0.9, and followed by the grass by 0.78. This study concluded that change in Zakho district land happened in a negative trend in regarding natural environment.