Land cover assessment is a significant research area in GIS and remote sensing, aiding decision-makers in understanding land use changes' underlying forces and enabling effective actions. In general, Iraqi cities are experiencing severe degradation of agricultural lands due to population growth and residential development, impacting socio-economic and environmental quality. In addition, the deriving forces of transforming the lands from agricultural to other land cover types are not well understood. Research is needed to map and assess agricultural lands for better economic and environmental solutions. The study uses ANN-CA integration to predict agricultural land changes in Babil province, central Iraq. The CNN model achieved the highest accuracy, with a total land cover transformation of 2143.1 square kilometres between 2000 and 2020. the overall accuracy was 0.95, 0.93, and 0.90 based on images captured in 2020, 2000, 2010) respectively. This methodology is considered an efficient tool for monitoring agricultural lands and developing development plans in Iraq.
The management of water resources requires adequate information on the quantities of water supplied from the basins that outfall into a river, especially during the flood seasons. The study area located in the western part of Iraq within the administrative boundaries of the Heet district about 70 km from Haditha Dam, 45km from Ramadi in Anbar province. The study aims to evaluate the amount of surface runoff through a long-term period (1981-2019). Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) related to Geographic Information System (ArcGIS) was used for the simulation. The input data was the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of SRTM with resolution 30m, land use/land cover map from the European Space Agency (ESA) with resolution 300m and, soil map from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The weather data used in the study were obtained from the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) combined with the weather data from the Surface meteorology and Solar Energy (SSE) produced by NASA. These weather data prepared using SWAT weather database software to be ready for the simulation processes. Al-Mohammedi valley was calibrated and validated using SWAT-CUP software using the available recorded discharges at Heet, Ramadi, and Al-Warar gauge stations. The calibration is based on the meteorological data for the period January 1, 2002, to December 31, 2006, and the validation was based on the data between January 1, 2007, to December 31, 2009. The model calibration and validation results based on two objective functions “Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) and coefficient of determination(R2)” showed that SWAT was successfully simulated Al-Mohammedi valley with NS = 0.72 and R2 = 0.76 for calibration, and NS = 0.63 and R2 = 0.65 for validation. According to SWAT results, the average runoff volume in the long-term period of simulation from January 1, 1981, to October 31, 2019, was 79.2 million m3 while the average runoff depth was 18.25 mm with about 17 % of rainfall becomes surface runoff.
Proliferated in recent years the desertification phenomenon, and the desert areas started expanding at the expense of green areas, which affected the environment. This research focused on studying the desertification and its changes regarding to the time, through using different multi band satellite images for the area of interest in different times and studying the changes appear to the land cover and calculating the areas of each parameter to make the comparison for each environmental parameter (soil, agriculture, and water).