Although the development of remote sensing techniques focuses greatly on construction of new sensors with higher spatial and spectral resolution, it is advisable to also use data of older sensors (especially, the LANDSAT-mission) when the historical mapping of land use/land cover and monitoring of their dynamics are needed. Using data from LANDSAT missions as well as from Terra (ASTER) Sensors, the authors shows in his book maps of historical land cover changes with a focus on agricultural irrigation projects. The kernel of this study was whether, how and to what extent applying the various remotely sensed data that were used here, would be an effective approach to classify the historical and current land use/land cover, to monitor the dynamics of land use/land cover during the last four decades, to map the development of the irrigation areas, and to classify the major strategic winter- and summer-irrigated agricultural crops in the study area of the Euphrates River Basin.

Nowadays, land cover changes are a major issue of global environmental change. Investigation on this subject has now been done by using remote sensing application. Research has been done in the Penang Island, which is one of the affected areas due to industrial and residential areas growth. Thus, this monograph is published to demonstrate an effective application through remote sensing technique to explore the environmental change and its impact on local environment that is caused by abrupt change in land use. It provides appropriate and comprehensive information for researchers involved in the study of environmental management, urban planning, land surface characteristics, and related support fields. This monograph highlights the relationship between land surface temperature and normalized difference vegetation index as the major results. The remote sensing technique used in this study was found to be efficient. It reduced the time for the analysis of land cover changes and was found to be a useful tool. Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia

Abstract: Land cover mapping and monitoring has been widely recognized as important for understanding global change and in particular, human contributions.This research emphasizes the use of the time domain for mapping land cover and changes in land cover using satellite images. Unlike most prior methods that compare pairs or sets of images for identifying change, this research compares observations with model predictions. Moreover, instead of classifying satellite images directly, it uses coefficients from time series models as inputs for land cover mapping. The methods developed are capable of detecting many kinds of land cover change as they occur and providing land cover maps for any given time at high temporal frequency.One key processing step of the satellite images is the elimination of "noisy" observations due to clouds, cloud shadows, and snow. I developed a new algorithm called Fmask that processes each Landsat scene individually using an object-based method. For a globally distributed set of reference data, the overall cloud detection accuracy is 96%. A second step further improves cloud detection by using temporal information.The first application of the new methods based on time series analysis found change in forests in an area in Georgia and South Carolina. After the difference between observed and predicted reflectance exceeds a threshold three consecutive times a site is identified as forest disturbance. Accuracy assessment reveals that both the producers and users accuracies are higher than 95% in the spatial domain and approximately 94% in the temporal domain.The second application of this new approach extends the algorithm to include identification of a wide variety of land cover changes as well as land cover mapping. In this approach, the entire archive of Landsat imagery is analyzed to produce a comprehensive land cover history of the Boston region. The results are accurate for detecting change, with producers accuracy of 98% and users accuracies of 86% in the spatial domain and temporal accuracy of 80%. Overall, this research demonstrates the great potential for use of time series analysis of satellite images to monitor land cover change