Analysis of Land Cover Changes in the Central Part of Isfahan (Iran) Using Landscape Metrics

Knowledge about long-term land cover/use changes is essential for evaluating and predicting their consequent problems by urban managers and policymakers. Remote sensing with landscape metrics is an effective tool for monitoring these changes in urban cores and their peripheral areas. During the recent decades, industrial and urban growth, and immigration of people into Isfahan metropolitan area (Iran) have affected its surrounding environment. The objective of this research was to quantify the changes of landscape patterns in the center of Isfahan during the last two decades. For monitoring spatial pattern changes, land use and cover maps of the area were prepared using supervised maximum likelihood classification of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images taken in 1990 and 2010. In order to quantify the changes in landscape patterns during this period, we used several landscape metrics of each class type and total landscape. These metrics included percentage of landscape (PLAND), number of patches (NP), mean patch size (MPS), patch density (PD), largest patch index (LPI), mean nearest neighbor (MNN), contagion (CONTAG), and Shannon’s diversity index (SHDI). The results of this study showed that the proportion of urban area and bare land significantly increased during the study period. Decreased mean patch area for agriculture and undeveloped land uses indicated that the landscape had been more fragmented in these two classes. The synoptic analysis of selected metrics for landscape level indicated that the metric values of MNNand SHDI to have increased and the metric values of LPI has reduced during the last two decades.