Assessing the effects of irrigated agricultural expansions on Lake Urmia using multi-decadal Landsat imagery and a sample migration technique within Google Earth Engine

Irrigated agricultural expansion is one of the main reasons for water scarcity in the Lake Urmia basin. Although previous studies have analyzed the impact of cropland expansion on the Lake Urmia Shrinkage, there is a lack of comprehensive annual assessment of historical irrigation expansion in the Lake Urmia basin and its impact on water resources of this region. In this study, we developed an automatic and efficient workflow using Landsat and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) data, GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) data, and a sample migration technique within the Google Earth Engine cloud computing platform to comprehensively investigate the impact of irrigated agricultural expansion on the shrinkage of Lake Urmia, as one of the most severe environmental crisis in the world. Additionally, using the global surface water data, we proposed a fully automatic procedure to obtain reference samples from water bodies. The Lake Urmia basin was first classified into the water, irrigated, and Non-Water/Irrigated classes using the random forest algorithm. The average overall accuracy of the produced annual land cover maps during 1987-2020 was 92.2%, representing the great potential of the developed method for land cover mapping. We found that the irrigated lands expanded by nearly 890 km(2) during the study period. Coincident with this change, although the area of water bodies in Lake Urmia partially recovered after 2015 (reached from 1,050 km(2) in 2015 to 3,370 km(2) in 2020), it is currently far beyond its original condition (i.e.,similar to 5,400 km(2), average record during 1987-2000). Moreover, the information of the Terrestrial Water Storage (TWS) from the GRACE and GRACE-FO data between 2003 and 2020 showed a dramatic decrease in TWS level (similar to-11.5 cm). The findings of this research will assist the local stakeholders and authorities to better understanding the environmental costs of irrigation expansion in the Lake Urmia basin.

Automated summary

This study developed an automatic workflow using satellite data and a cloud computing platform to investigate the impact of irrigated agricultural expansion on the shrinkage of Lake Urmia and the water resources. Findings showed expansion of irrigated lands and partial recovery of the water bodies in Lake Urmia after 2015.