Research Methodology - Historical Land Use/Land Cover Classification Using Remote Sensing - page 138

Fig. 5.55 The integration of the remotely sensed data with the construction scheme of the
21,000 ha project
possible for the State-run irrigation projects in the ''Organization of Development
of the Euphrates Basin'', which has three branches—the Upper-Euphrates in A-
leppo, the Mid-Euphrates in Arraqqah and the Lower-Euphrates in Deir Azzour.
These areas were well managed, and a detailed agricultural statistics procedure
was developed for every project.
One example of a training sample is a 17,000 ha project, which is integrated
with a state farm (4,000 ha). Thus, the total area is 21,000 ha located within the
Upper-Euphrates Basin in Aleppo, the reclamation began in 1979. The land is
irrigated by pumping water from Lake Al-Asad. The temporal developments in the
extension of this project were as followed: In 1979 (3,031 ha), 1980 (4,762 ha),
1981 (9,634 ha), 1982 (15,103 ha), 1990 (16,703 ha), 1991 (17,513 ha), 1992
(19,703 ha), 1993 (20,903 ha), and in 2005 (21,325 ha) with 100 % of the irri-
gation plan.
The first step was to integrate the construction scheme with the remotely sensed
data to extract the spatial distribution of the project of interest (Fig. 5.55 ). This
was complicated by the fact the area had no ground truth reference.
The second step was to define what ratio of agricultural crops existed. This was
generated from non-remotely sensed/human-based collected data (Table 5.7 ).