Sa'ad Rasheed Yousif Abu-Ghuneim

The large population growth of the province of Najaf, the latest great pressure on the city of Kufa, and the lack of adequate housing areas within the administrative boundaries has resulted in an increase of slums to a crawl towards agricultural areas and bypassed outside the administrative design of the city. Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have the potential to provide accurate information regarding land use and land cover changes. This paper testifies the appropriate techniques utilized to detect land use and land cover changes and the effect of irregular expansion on the urban planning.

Free-air gravity, magnetic and topographic data derived from satellite imagery are used to study the main geological structures and features in the Bahr An-Najaf Area SW Iraq. A comparison between this map and gravitational and magnetic maps along with two profiles, each one on a map for the same location and direction. Both profiles show a decrease in values in the eastward direction of the two maps.

Iraq is one of the dry regions, especially in the southern regions, where rains do not compensate the quantities of water lost due to evaporation, as the water in those regions that form the marshes, which originate from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and to some extent Karkheh and Karun Rivers must receive special attention in terms of regulating the quantities of water coming to them from the aforementioned sources besides rain, as well as regulating the outgoing water from them through the Shatt Al-Arab, which drains it to the Arabian Gulf. Here, there must be specialized studies that take upon themselves the feasibility of benefiting from the water concentrated in the marshes. These studies are dealt with irrigation and drainage methods, and studies dealing with the area in terms of the feasibility of agriculture from hydrological concepts. Measuring the ability of the marshes to meet the water needs of farmers, given that the water of the marshes is one of the hydrological features that make that water suitable for agriculture to some extent, if the marshes are considered strategic reservoirs. The importance of the studied area comes from the marshes were chosen within the list of UNESCO World Heritage.

Iraq represents the most diagnostic countries in hydrocarbon in the Middle East. A thick sedimentary succession, robust structures, high individual well productivity, and extensive oil reserves are some of the main characteristics of Iraqi oil fields. Iraq lies within the collided zone between the Arabian Plate that collides with the Persian and Anatolian plates which began after the termination of the Neo-Tethys Ocean in the Miocene. Owing to the trend of Persian and Anatolian plates, Iraq has two systems of faulting; these are the longitudinal faults (Najd system faults) and transversal faults. One of the longitudinal faults is the Makhul-Hemrin fault which extends until the study area. The Badra oilfield was studied by remote sensing imageries and subsurface geophysical maps that relate to seismotectonic of the Mesopotamian Plain of Iraq, and the surface data were correlated in harmony with the subsurface data to better assess the tectonic setting and the development of oilfields.

The research focuses on mixing of Landsat8 ETM+ images for sector of Tar An- Najaf Phenomenon for the sake of gaining the optimum description showing the ground guidelines of the studied area. The optimum Index Factor (OIF) method has ensured that RGB567 represents the preferred mixed bands, where vegetated areas, water and rocks and deposits more obviously distributed. The determinant covariance matrix method stated that RGB457 considered the optimum for spectral resolution. For comparison with Principal Component Analysis, the latter involves PC1,2,3 and shows clear variations that serve the interpreter as a detailed study. Through the study, the best method is the second one.

This paper deals with assessing and detecting the changes of soil salinity and vegetation cover for a part of An-Najaf Governorate and verification regarding the impression of soil salinity on the change of vegetative regions, over the period from 2001 to 2015. The results demonstrated a clear reduction in vegetative cover with salinity rates increased. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and Soil Salinity Index (SI) were applied for each date using the multispectral images derived from Landsat ETM+ and OLI data. Then image differencing technique was utilized to detect the change/no-change for vegetation and salinity for the two study periods.

Which was held in the College of Education / University of Al-Qadisiyah for the period from 23-24/1/2019

Which was held at the University of Baghdad on August 28, 2019

Which was held at Al-Karkh University of Science for the period from 14-15/11/2018

Which was held at the University of Kashan / Iran for the period from 11-16/2/2019

Which was held at the University of Kufa on 7/13/2020

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