Spatio Temporal Analysis in Land Use and Land Cover Using GIS Case Study: Gaza City (Period 1999 – 2007)

Abstract

In recent years, Gaza City is exposed to a large amount of land use and land cover changes, as aresult of lack of planning and monitoring programs. This leads to complex serious problems such as: lack of storm water infiltration, impact of global warming, potential agricultural failures, soil erosion, etc. Due to increasing changes of land use, mainly by human activities, detection of such changes, assessment of their trends and environmental effects are necessary for future planning and resource management. This study aims to detect changes occurred in Gaza City for land use and land cover during the interval between 1999 and 2007using GIS techniques. It shows that within the period from 1999 to 2007, the built up areas have been reached the highest increase (8.06%). On the other hand, both of green and dry lands have been decreased. Certainty, the green lands is transformed from 41.79% in 1999 to 38.80% and the dry lands become 18.80% in 2007 while it is 24.16% in 1999. For the wet lands, the area of this category has been increased with a percent of 0.96% as a total in 2007. Depending on those numbers, the study expects that the built up areas will be the dominance at the expense of other categories as a result of the continuous population growth and in accordance to the proposed master plan of 2025 of Gaza City. The study strongly recommends giving real opportunity for the local community in sharing in the awareness campaigns to introduce the scope of this study for all community sectors to be aware about LULC for upcoming generations.