International Journal of Constructive Research in Civil Engineering (IJCRCE) Volume 4, Issue 1, 2018, PP 23-38 ISSN 2454-8693 (Online) DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.20431/2454-8693.0401003 www.arcjournals.org International Journal of Constructive Research in Civil Engineering (IJCRCE) Page | 23 Change Detection of Urban Land Use and Urban Expansion Using GIS and RS, Case Study: Zanjan Province, Iran Mojtaba Pirnazar 1 , Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari 2* , Saeid Eslamian 3 , Vijay P. Singh 4 , Nicolas R. Dalezios 5 , Mohsen Ghane 6 , Zahra Qasemi 7 1 Department of Remote Sensing, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran 2* Department of Civil Engineering, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran 3 Department of Water Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, Iran 4 Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering &Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, Texas A and M University, 321 Scoates Hall, 2117 TAMU, College Station, Texas 77843-2117, U.S.A. 5 Laboratory of Hydrology, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece & Department of Natural Resources Development and Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural University of Athens, Athens, Greece. 6 Civil Engineering Department, South Tehran Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran 7 Department of Remote Sensing, Yazd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran 1. INTRODUCTION The cities accommodate various activities and multiple functionalities where any changes in them are inevitable. In the past fifty years, the spatial organization of the cities and their original structure has changed dramatically, and thus the cities are segmented to different regions, each involving a particular activity. The rapid growth of the cities and urbanization is consequence of industrialization and the changes made in technology. Change detection includes application of multi-temporal data in order to identify the regions in which land-use has changed during different periods of imagery. These changes may be result of short term cover changes such as snowfall, floods, or changes in land-use like urban development and conversion of agricultural lands into residential and industrial purposes (Rabiei et al, 2004). There are different methods to obtain extent and severity of land-use changes, from Principal Component Analysis to Spectro-temporal Classification and using fuzzy logic etc. In places where landscapes, in particular urban land-uses are under change due to human activities and natural processes like erosion, using the geographical information system (GIS), remote sensing and data processing can be helpful in analyzing the changes and extent of them [1-14]. Abstract: Accurate data and timely information regarding the existing land-uses is needed to manage the natural landscapes effectively. The information related to land-use changes constitutes the basic element in management of natural resources. In fact, the awareness about patterns of land-use changes is conductive of ecosystem toward balance. Therefore, the need to detect, plan and predict such changes in an ecosystem is of great importance. In order to discover these changes, the application of multi-temporal remote sensing data (RS) and geographical information system (GIS) provides the possibility of valuable analysis. In this paper, two images, i.e. ETM+ 2002 and OLI 2015 were used for Zanjan city. To map the pattern of changes, at first the coordinates of two images were integrated, andafter the atmospheric corrections, the considered area was classified to four classes including residential areas, road network, vegetation and other regions using the maximum likelihood method. Then,Post classification and overlapping methods were used to detect changes. The results show that the urban expansion has increased during 13 years. The expansion of Zanjan City has been inclined more toward north and north –west affecting the barren lands, while the garden lands in the south has been less influenced by urban expansion. Keywords: Change detection, Land-use, Remote sensing, GIS, Landsat, Zanjan city *Corresponding Author: Dr. Kaveh Ostad-Ali-Askari, Department of Civil Engineering, Isfahan (Khorasgan) Branch, Islamic Azad University, Isfahan, Iran. Emails: Koa.askari@khuisf.ac.ir, Kaveh.oaa2000@gmail.com