in central part of Iran and Dasht-e- 
Luo is less than 50mm,while the 
evapotranspiration is more than 4000 
mm. land degradation and _ soil 
errosion in the  onterior plateau of 
Iran has been closely associated with 
man's settelment and his activities. 
There is much evidance to porove 
this occurrence during past 
centuries. However the land 
degradation 
accelarated 
and desertification has 
during the last centuries 
and especially during the last 25 
years. 
The following comprise the most 
imprtant causes of desertification 
-Demographic exploration 
-Increase in herds and over grazing 
-Conversion of rangelands to 
croplands and increase of dry 
farming 
-Uncontroiled use of farm machinery 
-Fuel gathering 
-Irregular exploration of water 
resource and mismanaged irrigation. 
Aim: 
The aim of this paper is to discribe 
the role of GIS & Remote Sensing to 
up-date ,assesment and monitoring 
the renewable natural resouces of 
Iran in two projects(Shahrod & 
Chalus in central and north part of 
Iran ) in order to extand for whole 
Country. 
Data Aqusition: 
For these two projects we used 
multispectral  landsat (TM jullay1988) 
and panchromatic SPOT( june 1993) to 
produce the land cover map and also 
photomap in scale of 1:50000 in order 
to up-to-dete the information of 
approximately about 150000 hectares 
of land. 
Image Processing: 
Al the satellite images corrected, 
through relaiable software (PCI),using 
exising maps,to the coordinate system 
of Iran 
234 
Classification: 
Supervised calssification used and we 
could identify 14 classes of features 
such as vegetation, (forest,rangeland, 
shrubland ,agriculture,and etc.) 
infarstrcture,desert, waterbodies, and 
some other sources. 
Field Work: 
In project involving classification 
field recconaissances have to carried 
out in order to understand the 
images and to- correlate image 
features with ground features.As part 
of project 10 surveys were 
performed.During the field work ,the 
classification System with logical 
structure ‚and suitable both for the 
image intrpritation and a statistical 
analysis of the result ,was created. 
Application Of GIS: 
To delineate the 
and monitoring 
change detection 
land resources we 
degitized old maps and previous 
information through Geographical 
Information System(PC  ARC/INFO) 
Although the vector fomat of GIS 
files creates some difficulties in 
inegration with raster  files(image 
processing) ,still there are more 
reasonable procedure of achivement. 
Altogehter 
Cover 
15 Thematic maps such as 
Land map(fig. 1 
  
  
  
LANDCOVER & VEGETATION MAP 
Adak £41 30.000 
AV rm tee x pm mue. 3 i^ sab euer oum mea 
oma tb nn 2 ERS 
| T 
E aptgnte e imet up n nt 
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXI, Part B7. Vienna 1996 
Rise o Nu EN.