Applications of GIS and remote sensing techniques to land use management

Employing geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) techniques is a very important issue these days as they aid planners and decision makers to make effective and correct decisions and designs. They allow the engineer to continuously monitor any change any intended plans to secure their success or rectification to meet the requirements. The role of the RS is in assigning different colors to different covers of land to distinguish their existence and change with time and to allow all kinds of analysis. It supplies the needed geo database to build informative and rich GIS. The role of GIS is in storing, managing a great deal of data about the images and all the related attributes to allow their manipulation, analysis and finally presentation according to choice. GIS great ability in presentation facilitates the analysis, computations, prediction, retrieving through many types of processing, especially overlaying of different layers extracted from multi date remotely sensed data. The endless abilities of combining RS and GIS allow to do the most tedious work in a flexible, fast and accurate manner, especially with the availability of more and more sattelite images and the improvement of their quality with time. In this paper, we presnet a methodology for land use management using GIS and RS techniques. GIS is built for a study area and three landsat sattelite images for three different dates are processed and analyzed using RS techniques through their normalized vegetation index (NDVI). The results showed an increased distraction and desertification of an important part from the cultivated and grazing lands .