Nser Ahmadi Sani - Assistant Professor, Faculty of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Mahabad Branch, Islamic Azad University,Mahabad, Iran.
Karim solaimani - Professor, Department of Watershed Management, Sari university, Iran.
lida Razaghnia - MSc. of Watershed Management, Department of Watershed Management, Haraz University, Iran

In recent decades, rapid and incorrect changes in land use have been associated withconsequences such as natural resources degradation and environmental pollution.Detecting land use changes is a suitable technique for natural resource management.The goal of this research is to study the land use change in Haraz Basin with an area of677000 hectares in 15 years (1996 & 2011) using Landsat data. After making thenecessary corrections and preparing the indices, the image classification into nineclasses was by supervised classification and Maximum Likelihood algorithm. Finally,the changes were extracted by Post classification comparison. The results showed thatduring the 15 years there was a 27.5% change in land use of the area. These changesare related to conversion of rangelands to bare lands and dry farming ones; and alsoconverting the dense forest to sparse forest, horticulture, farming lands, and residentialareas. These changes can be due to an increase in population and human activities,which result in increasing demands for natural sources and converting them intofarming lands, horticulture, residential and industrial areas. These land use changesalong with climate changes are an alarm for the Haraz Basin status in the future.

Change detection, Haraz Basin, land use, Remote Sensing