The Use of Remote Sensing and GIS to Study Land Use Changes in Barka Wilaya, Oman

Many studies house indicated the increase of the proportion of urban areas over the arable land inmany provinces of the Sultanate of Oman. This came as a result of urban growth and developmentprocesses taking place since the era of the Renaissance which started in 1970. Consequently, spatialvariation in land use is an important issue to be taken into consideration, because lands are beingconverted to be less productive, due to the lack of raw soil, vegetation, and water as a result of humanexploitation of the limited resources in different ways, in addition to the natural factors of droughtsand floods and all that will eventually lead to land degradation. Barka province (wilayat) in al BatinahGovernorate is one of the provinces, which has been affected by land cover/land use changes due toseveral reasons. Therefore, this study will focus on the determination of land use changes, whethercommercial or residential that have been occurred in the province, in addition to the loss of agriculturalareas and fertile land during the period from 1987 to 2015. Remote sensing and geographic informationsystem (GIS) were utilized in order to delineate and to determine the cause of shrinking in the arableland and fertile land. Satellite images were used to detect the change in land use/land cover by applyingselective digital image processing techniques such as supervised classification and change detection.Thematic maps were prepared using GIS software with attribute data about the land uses in the studyarea, which highlights and show the impact of urban growth on land degradation.