Desertification Phenomenon Assessment in Al-Hay District, Wasit/Iraq Using Remote Sensing Techniques

Desertification has developed rapidly in recent years due to years of neglect in environmental management, especially in the agriculture and irrigation sectors in the study area (Al-Hay District, Wasit Governorate, Iraq). Several factors have combined to create this problem within the lands of the study area, represented by natural geographical factors, such as climate, soil, water, and natural vegetation. Therefore, it has become necessary to address the phenomenon of desertification in this work, especially after waves of water scarcity, problems of human urban expansion, and droughts that have swept many countries. The current research aims to evaluate the desertification phenomenon by monitoring the changes in the land cover and land use of the study area, as an attempt to develop solutions and proposals that may contribute to the process of reducing the spread of desertification. Integration between remote sensing (RS) techniques and geographic information systems (GIS) is utilized to evaluate desertification and assess the sensitivity of areas to this phenomenon that traditional methods (e, g. direct observation, map interpretation, and field survey) are unable to provide. Supervised and unsupervised classification techniques were utilized to build a geographic information base by analyzing and interpreting the satellite images of the Landsat 8 satellite. The findings demonstrated how crucial it is to integrate RS and GIS while tracking the desertification phenomenon, both inside and outside of the study area. The categorized images are considered appropriate for further research because Kappa coefficients are considered significantly of about more than 0.86.