Land cover change (LCC) is important to assess the land use/land cover changes with respect to the development activities like irrigation. The region selected for the study is Vaal Harts Irrigation Scheme (VHS) occupying an area of approximately 36, 325 hectares of irrigated land. The study was carried out using Land sat data of 1991, 2001, 2005 covering the area to assess the changes in land use/land cover for which supervised classification technique has been applied. The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) index was also done to assess vegetative change conditions during the period of investigation. By using the remote sensing images and with the support of GIS the spatial pattern of land use change of Vaal Harts Irrigation Scheme for 15 years was extracted and interpreted for the changes of scheme. Results showed that the spatial difference of land use change was obvious. The analysis reveals that 37.86% of additional land area has been brought under fallow land and thus less irrigation area (18.21%). There is an urgent need for management program to control the loss of irrigation land and therefore reclaim the damaged land in order to make the scheme more viable.
The difficulties of access and detailed measurements of land surface temperature (LST) and water surface temperature (WST) especially in wetlands made the use of remote sensing data as one of the sources and techniques to estimate many climate elements including surface temperature and surface emissivity (ɛ). This study aims to estimate the surface tempera-ture of the wetland of Lake Oubeira located in northeastern Algeria and their spatiotemporal evolution in both land and wa-ter. Landsat OLI-TIRS images in two dates (April and September 2016) obtained from the USGS have been used in this work, and forms the basis of a series of operations to obtain the final LST: development of the normalized difference vegeta-tion index (NDVI), conversion of the digital number (DN) of the thermal infrared band (TIR) into spectral radiance as well as the calculation of the effective luminosity temperature of the sensor from the spectral radiation and surface emissivity (ɛ). The results show that the LST varies in space and time (from 16 to 31°C in April and from 24 to 41°C in September). This implies that the absorption of the equilibrium temperature at land cover depends on the optical properties of the sur-face, which are essentially determined by its water content, colour and morphology. At the same time, the water surface is the lowest land cover temperature, which also has a spatial variation (from 19 to 25°C in April and from 26 to 34.5°C in September) induced by atmospheric temperature, wind direction and speed and the depth of the lake.