ABSTRACT
The extension of bare lands at the expense of productive lands has been a repeated phenomenon in different places on the earth’s surface and there are many evidences which indicate human misuse of land that accelerating this phenomenon. The main objective of this paper is to detect land cover changes at Sharq Alneel Locality, Khartoum State in 20 years (1995 – 2015), and to show their driving forces. The paper used remote sensing technique, which considered as one of the most important recent means that facilitates efficient decision making for resources management, as baseline tool to detect land cover changes. This technique has been supported by qualitative interviews. Tow satellite imageries were used in this paper: Thematic Mapper (land sat 5, TM 1995) and Operation Land Image (land sat 8, OLI 2015) which are digitally processed using ERDAS Imagine 2014 to classify land cover types of the study area. The images were classified into four classes: natural vegetation, bare lands, agricultural areas and residential areas using supervised classification method and then post-classification technique was applied to identify the changes in the years (1995-2015).The analysis of the satellite imageries showed the transformation of natural vegetation cover to bare lands. The findings showed that natural vegetation cover decreased from 5156 km2 in 1995 to 2710 km2 in 2015, while bare lands increased from 2744 km2 in 1995 to 4454 km2 in 2015. All other types of land cover of the study area were increased at the expense of natural vegetation cover. These changes indicate to the acceleration of land degradation as a normal consequence of human misuse of land and absence of ongoing monitoring and assessments of these natural resources by the specialized authorities.
KEYWORDS
land cover, remote sensing, change detection, driving forces, Sharq Alneel Locality