30-08-2017, 01:16 PM
Growing concern about environmental degradation, such as erosion and sediment loads, justifies the integration of complex and dispersed geographic data sets. This paper describes the use of the Geographic Information System (GIS) and remote sensing to assess the impact of land use changes on water turbidity in multiple watersheds. In this study, the necessary datasets representing land uses, hydrology, climate, soils, elevation and surface characteristics were integrated into a GIS in tabular, vector, and grid format. The land use maps derived from the Landsat-5 TM images using a combination of different classification strategies gave an average accuracy of 95%. The results of the data analysis had shown that there is a close relationship between the extent of the open area and the rate of sedimentation load. However, sediment load rates were not linear, ranging from 1.47 to 2.13 tonnes per millimeter of rain per square kilometer of open areas, depending on the location of open areas with respect to factors such as sediment availability, soil type, slope, slope, etc.