RT - Journal Article T1 - Study of Land Use and Land Cover Change in Lighvan Watershed, East Azerbaijan Province JF - geospace YR - 2015 JO - geospace VO - 15 IS - 49 UR - http://geographical-space.iau-ahar.ac.ir/article-1-1710-en.html SP - 75 EP - 100 K1 - Land use/Land cover (LULC) K1 - Classification K1 - Satellite images K1 - NDVI K1 - Lighvan Watershed. AB - Remote sensing provides necessary and sufficient facilities to extract and update land use/land cover (LULC) maps for planners and managers. In this work, we presented a case study of LULC change as a consequence of human population and activities, in the Lighvan watershed, using multi temporal satellite images analysis. In order to perform the research, four images of Landsat satellite include MSS 1976, TM 1989, ETM+ 2000 and 2010 have been used. Supervised classification technique 10 English Abstracts by using maximum likelihood method with the aid of ground truth data is carried out. Normalized difference vegetation Index (NDVI) and post classification comparison, were evaluated to detect environmental changes over the period from 1976 to 2010. NDVI results highlighted significant reduction of dense vegetation cover, over time. This reduction in vegetation cover density is mainly due to the increasing extent of urban areas, the building of roads, non managed rainfed farming, and the conversion of dense pastures to weak. Analysis of population trend changes in Lighvan and Sefideh Khan villages revealed that population changes is matched with the LULC changes and immigration of villagers between 1979 to 1986 has been played an important role in the LULC changes of study watershed. LA eng UL http://geographical-space.iau-ahar.ac.ir/article-1-1710-en.html M3 ER -