Abstract:

For monitoring and conservation of water resources and evaluation of optimum operating conditions, not only classical hydrogeological and hydrological methods but also remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) are exploited. These technologies provide a basis for managing and decision making opportunities in research related to water resources. Besides, remote sensing and GIS have provided very important advantages for determination of temporal changes in water resources and taking necessary measures. In this study, water surface changes were determined using multi-temporal satellite imageries of two lakes (having similar geographic latitudes)between the years 1975-2010. One of these lakes is Urmia located in the western Azarbaijan Province of Iran and the other lake is Acıgöl in the Mediterranean Region which is one of the Turkey's most important ecological areas. ERDAS Imagine 2010, ArcInfo 10, MATLAB and eCognition Definiens software were used for GIS and remote sensing applications. At the study, long-time climatic data, lake surface data, LANDSAT MSS, TM and ETM imageries were used. In the study area, lake surfaces changes were determined by using supervised, unuspervised and object based classification methods and lake surface changes were determined by using manual digitalization and semi-automatical vectorization. Furthermore, an algorithm was developed to determine water surface changes of the lakes.

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