The Spatial and Temporal Land Cover Patterns of the Qazaly Irrigation Zone in 2003–2018: The Case of Syrdarya River’s Lower Reaches, Kazakhstan

Kanat Samarkhanov, Jilili Abuduwaili, Alim Samat, Gulnura Issanova

2019

Full text Open access: Gold Metadata (CSL-JSON)
DOI 10.3390/su11154035
Data confidence 70 medium
How this score is calculated

It is built from checkable properties of the record itself: whether the article has a DOI, how many independent sources confirmed its data, whether the required fields are filled in, and how recent the latest confirmation is. Disagreement between sources and a missing identifier lower it. A value of 80 or above means the record was published without further checking; 60 to 79 means it is published at reduced confidence, with a manual check advisable. A record verified by an editor by hand is never pushed below 90 by a recalculation. This scores our data about the article, not the article itself.

Abstract

In this study, the spatial and temporal patterns of the land cover were monitored within the Qazaly irrigation zone located in the deltaic zone of the Syrdarya river in the surroundings of the former Aral Sea. A 16-day MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) Aqua NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) data product with a spatial resolution of 250 meters was used for this purpose, covering the period between 2003 and 2018. Field survey results obtained in 2018 were used to build a sample dataset. The random forests supervised classification machine learning algorithm was used to map land cover, which produced good results with an overall accuracy of about 0.8. Statistics on land cover change were calculated and analyzed. The correctness of obtained classes was checked with Landsat 8 (OLI, The Operational Land Imager) images. Detailed land cover maps, including rice cropland, were derived. During the observation period, the rice croplands increased, while the generally irrigated area decreased.