Results, Analysis and Discussion - Historical Land Use/Land Cover Classification Using Remote Sensing - page 192

Fig. 6.14 The 21-detailed LULC-changes that resulted from applying the post-classification
change detection approach for the period 1987-2007
according to the availability of rains. The change into bare areas can interpreted as
being due to the climatic factors (precipitation in particular), as most of these lands
exist in the five agricultural stabilization zones (Al-Badia), i.e., to the east of the
Al-Balikh River. The change from artificial surfaces to cultivated areas can be seen
almost as a misclassification between the artificial surfaces (especially the dark
appeared civilization areas) and the cultivated areas (the fallow on dark soils).The
change into bare areas can be analyzed because of the misclassification between
the dark appeared civilization areas (e.g., the cities) and the dark colored bare
areas (e.g., the inactive volcanoes area in the east of Arraqqa City), and the
misclassification between the light appearing areas of artificial surfaces category
(e.g., waste dumps and extraction sites) and the bare areas with light parent rocks
or those that covered with shifting sands (e.g., dunes). The shift from bare areas to
cultivated lands was because of the expansion in agriculture. Finally, the change of
part of the water-bodies area into cultivated areas was because the misclassifi-
cation of the TM-2007 final-data, where a dust-storm appeared over some river
parts between the two cities of Arraqqa and Deir Azzour, in addition to the drying
of the swamps, which has left the river without some of its elbows (the abandoned
elbows).
Spatial distribution of changes/mapping. This is illustrated by the thematic
change map (Fig. 6.14 ) for the period 1987-2007. This thematic map was pro-
duced by overlaying the two LULC-classification results of the two dates, to