A remote sensing and GIS‑based analysis of urban sprawl in Soran District, Iraqi Kurdistan

摘要

Determination of spatial and temporal patterns of urban growth has become one of the most significant challenges inmonitoring and assessing current and future trends of the urban growth issue. Soran district has witnessed very rapidgrowth in the last two decades, mostly because of its economic, commercial and social attractions. The aim of this work isto study the growth and sprawl dynamics through the land use and land cover (LULC) maps for the area at three differentperiods (1998, 2008, and 2018) particularly in the urban areas employing GIS and RS techniques. Three Landsat images,Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus in the 1998, Thematic Mapper in the 2008 and Landsat Operational Land (LOL) in the2018 were used to assess the changes of urban encroachment. A supervised classification technique by maximum likelihoodclassifier has been employed to create a classified image and has been assessed based on Kappa index. The resultsobtained showed that the urbanized area increased from 4.51 to 14.93 km~2 from 1998 to 2018. This study demonstratedthat the substantial changes in LULC in Soran district since the end of 1990s are directly related to and influenced by themain and secondary roads development on spatial expansion and land use change.