Flood Behavior of Al-Hammar Marshes

Abstract

Abstract The marshes of southern Iraq are among the most important and largest wetlands in the Middle East and the world are characterized by the freshness of their waters and their environmental diversity. The marshes have undergone many changes during the past decades and to discover and study these changes, remote sensing data will be used as sources of information and data in this study represented by the Landsat 8 satellite images (OLI), the images were collected for years from 2013 to 2019, and by applying remote sensing techniques and geographic information systems techniques, changes in Al-Hammar marsh were detected during the past seven years, the supervised classification method (maximum likelihood) was applied to classify the region Were identified six main categories of the land cover (deep water, shallow water, small cane, large cane, plant, soil) using the software (ENVI 5.3), the final maps were produced for classification using (ArcGIS 10.4.1) software, the results showed Significant change in the water content of Al-Hammar marsh and the increase in the proportion of flooding during the year 2019 to the highest rate since 2013. In addition, the results showed the accuracy and success of the supervised classification method (maximum likelihood) in the classification of images as they are considered the best classification methods, the fastest and high accuracy.