THE POTENTIAL OF GIS ANALYSES IN FARMING SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT THE CASE OF AL FARIA’A BASIN- WESTERN OF THE JORDAN VALLEY

With the increasing population in Palestine, demand for agriculture resources has increased promoting farming system (land use) changes whereas water resources are becoming scarce. Current and accurate land use / land cover inventories are essential information for studying and monitoring farming systems and for make sound plans for the future. This paper presents GIS as a method using land use components into analysis the farming system development. Geographical information system (GIS) Land sat TM Thematic Mapper data was used as a tool to study the farming system in Al Faria’a basin- Western of the Jordan valley, Palestine. To derive the land use and land cover classes in the study area, satellite images from the years, 1990, 1996, 1999 were analysed with the help of supervised classification approaches based on spectral pattern recognition, and post classification to derive the land use change, GIS analysing method. The GIS analyses were applied with the help of image processing software, Erdas Imagine version 8.4; the inverse distance weighted (IDW) method was used to integrate the data from farm family survey. The analysis demonstrates that most of the changes in land use in Al Faria’a basin between the years 1990-1996 and the years 1996-1999 occurred in the vegetation cover, while urban or bare rock did not change much during the last ten-year interval. This change in the vegetation cover could be attributed to social, economical, and political issues. The differences in imaginary are also partly linked to technical factors such as the time of the image acquiring. While the GIS analysis shows an expansion in the vegetation cover, a simultaneous survey on farming system level shows that the water content has been continuously decreasing. This stresses the need to search for alternative water sources in order to support the agriculture in the basin such as low quality water reuse