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Agriculture / Soil
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Agricultural Applications of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System in Land-use and Land Suitability Mapping
Eng. Hussein Harahsheh
Royal Jordanian Geographic Centre
Amman-Jordan
1944
1. Introduction
Natural resources in arid and semi-arid area, which is the case of Jordan declining in productivity required special attention, if the determining ecological conditions persist, a further decline in resources may result in desertification which is more permanent. Therefore, we should look for the optimum solution regarding the land-use planning.
The large area perspective of aerial and space-borne remote sending data, their respectively, the ability to reduce field work and decreasing travel cost, and the accurate, timely, complete and cost-effective information, are few of many reasons for the increasing use of remote sensing techniques by resources manager.
Since we need to use different kind of data and information (Soil, Hydrology, geomorphology, topography etc) the geographic information system become a flexible and powerful tool than conventional data processing systems, as it provides a means of taking large volumes of different kinds of data sets and , manipulating and combining the data sets into new data sets as a results can be displayed on maps. In this paper we combines climatic, topographic, soil and land use data sets in order to produce land suitability maps.
2. Study Area
The study area approximately 1200 km2 in extent, lies on the northern plateau of Jordan and situated about 70 km North of Amman. Geological formations occurring with in the area consist of limestone, marls chalky limestone and alluvial of Cretaceous with a small part of Kurnb sand stone. The study area can be divided geomorphologycally into two subareas. The western limestone Ajlun hilly area and the flat alluvial area extending between Irbid and Ramnath. In altitude it range from 600 m to 1000 m. the climat4e is classified as semi-arid Mediterranean climate, which it is recognized by four seasons with warm summer and cold winter, with average annual rainfall caries from 250mm in the east part to mote than 500mm in the west part of the study area.
Figure 1: Location of the Study Area
3. Materials and Supporting Data
The most common date for land use analysis are satellite data. They become very popular in recent years because of their better spatial and spectral resolution and their capacity to generate multitemporal products more cheaply than aerial photos. Besides that land suitability analysis needs thematic maps such as soil, slope and rainfall maps. Data on crop rotation \m agricultural statistics and socio-economic conditions are also valuable background information.
The following data were used in this study:
- SPOT XS image of 1989 and SPOT Panchromatic of 1990
- Topographic maps scale 1-100000 and scale 1 - 50000
- Aerial Photos scale 1-30000
- Soil map scale 1-250000
- Rainfal map
- Field informations
4. Methodology
4.1 Land use mapping
We after a qualitative analysis using visual interpretation on display image after applying several enhancement and color composition techniques. On a second stage, we utilize the spectral classification techniques, they are based on an automatic analysis and correlations of spectral signature of an object to the object itself. The spectral signature of an object is usually represented by characteristics reflectance curves in the part of the solar spectrum, covered by satellite sensor (e.g. Landsat, SPOT). Soil and vegetation spectral signatures like those of other objects, vary according to parameters such as moisture and state of vegetation etc.
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