Evaluating Trend of Physical Urban Expansion of Shiraz City and physiographic conditions effect on land use changes

Extended abstract1- IntroductionNatural environment hasn’t permanently adjusted with urban expansion and human settlements. Many historical cities have been abandoned due to these Natural environment incompatibilities. The most effective factors of natural environment on urban expansion are topography, slope, weather, geology, hydrology and geomorphology conditions. By increasing of trend urbanization, cities need to vast territories for settling the population, these territories have composed of different topographic and geomorphologic units. The impact of growth rate of city size on topographic and geomorphologic units will be complicated, by increasing of urban expansion. Orientation of physical expansion in terms of effective factors must be in a way that less damages imposes on natural environment and can be preserved environment in a direction of preservation of sustainable Development. Changes in the earth’s surface can be related to natural dynamics or human activities and can occur either suddenly or gradually. Accelerated urban growth is usually associated with and driven by the population concentration in an area. The extent of urbanization or its growth drives the change in land use/cover pattern. Land use and land cover changes may have adverse impacts on ecology of the area, specially hydro-geomorphology and vegetation. As the characteristics of land cover have important impacts on climate, biogeochemistry, hydrology and species diversity, land cover change has been indicated as one of the high priority concerns for research and for the development of strategies for sustainable management. Although urban areas currently cover only 3% of the Earth’s land surface, they have marked effects on environmental conditions at both local and global scales, including climate change.2- MethodologyRecently, remote sensing has been used in combination with Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Global Positioning Systems to assess land cover change more effectively than by remote sensing data only. This paper presents an integrated study of land use/cover changes and urban expansion in Shiraz city, Fars province in Iran. The study explores the temporal and spatial characteristics of urban expansion and land use/cover changes from 1990 to 2009. Statistical classification approaches have been used for the classification of the remotely sensed images obtained from various sensors viz. Landsat TM, ETM+ and IRS PAN, LISS-III.3– DiscussionLand use/land cover changes (LUCC) are major cause of ecological environmental changes. Geometric correction was perfor