Study of Urban Development and Vegetation Changes in Mazandaran by Change Vector Analysis to Protection and Landscape Management Improvement
Subject Areas : Land use planning
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Abstract :
Mazandaran province has always been considered by tourists due to its high tourism potential. Therefore, in order to satisfy the people and tourists, urban development has been expanded there. In addition, the relative increase in population, the development of industries, the problem of solid waste and wastewater, habitat destruction, energy, transportation and agriculture demand have affected the environment of Mazandaran. On the other hand, it has a high rate of vegetation degradation. Monitoring of land use and land cover changes play an important role in urban planning and landscape management. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the changes of Mazandaran province landscape using the time series of satellite data from 1988 to 2018 in order to plan for better management to protect the landscape and control development and destruction. In this study, urban development and vegetation changes of Mazandaran province were studied using Landsat satellite images by Change Vector Analysis method in each city over a period of 30 years. The results showed that the rate of urban development and vegetation degradation change in the study period is increasing in the province. The high rate of urban development changes in terms of percentage of area is related to the cities of Babolsar, Nowshahr and Chalous, includes 21, 15 and 11% of their total area, respectively. These three cities have the highest number of tourists per year and the highest number of villas. The high rate of destruction of deforestation in terms of area related to Sari, Neka and Behshahr, in the east of the province, includes 27, 11 and 7 hectares, respectively. The change vector analysis method has the ability to satisfactorily reveal and classify all types of changes in magnitude and direction in the landscape.