VEGETATION COVER MONITORING IN MOSUL CITY USING REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUE

This study aims to identify changes in vegetation cover and its impact on the climate of Mosul City.The analytical method of the study relies on changes in Land Use/Land Cover (LULC), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and Land Surface Temperature (LST); GIS technology was used to measure these statistics.Landsat (5,8) imagery was used to detect the change in vegetation cover change and land surface temperature during the study period from 2010 to 2022, where the unsupervised classification technique was used to determine LU variations.The results revealed significant changes among the LU classes during the study period, primarily due to human activities.The most prominent change in LU was the urban expansion of agricultural land; continuously in all years, the vegetation cover area decreased from around 4076 km2 in 2010 to 1504 km2 in 2022, concentrated in the northeastern part of the city.This has led to negative effects on the climate, where temperature rates increased from (1-47 C0) in 2010 to (5.7-53 C0) in the last year of the study; the highest temperatures were recorded in urban growth areas and areas without vegetation.