Detection of Changes in Land Use/Cover in Muhayil Asir (Saudi Arabia) during 1990 – 2019, Using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System

The research aimed to study and analyze the changes of Land Use/Cover and the vegetation patterns in Muhayil Asir Governorate during the period 1990-2019 using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System. Imageries from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Sentinel-2 were used. The visuals underwent the pre-processing and classification analysis using the supervised classification method. The results of the accuracy assessment were 91.02% for the producer's accuracy and 89.9% for the consumer's accuracy. The results showed that the study area has four types of land cover: agricultural land, urban areas, soil (unutilized land) and rocks. The area of agricultural land has increased 18.08 km² (0.94%) during the period 1990 – 2019 and extended towards the areas of urbanization. This change coincided with increased the built areas by 65.19 km² (3.40%). The increase in agricultural and built areas occurred at the expense of unutilized lands which decreased by (-4.34%). There was no change in rock outcrops over the study period. The study concluded that the most important reasons that affected the change in the land cover pattern and applications increase in the population at a rate of 2.03% population growth and the increase in income and expansion of services, which required increasing the horizontal and vertical expansion, which would affect changing patterns of Land Use/Cover for study area. Keywords: Land use, change detection, Remote Sensing, GIS.