Quantifying and visualizing 32 years of agricultural land use change in Kabul, Afghanistan

Figures & data

Figure 1. Study area figure.

Map of study area around Kabul, Afghanistan. Within this area, 4 yellow-outline boxes denote the extent of accuracy assessment.

Table 1. Landsat images used in annual NDVI analysis; NA indicates that an image was not available during the growing season with low cloud coverage.

Year	Sat/Sensor	Acquisition date
1988	L5 TM	05/09/1988
1989	–	NA
1990	L5 TM	5/15/1990
1991	–	NA
1992	L5 TM	5/4/1992
1993	L5 TM	5/23/1993
1994	L5 TM	5/10/1994
1995	L5 TM	5/13/1995
1996	L5 TM	5/15/1996
1997	L5 TM	5/18/1997
1998	L5 TM	5/21/1998
1999	L5 TM	5/8/1999
2000	L5 TM	5/10/2000
2001	L5 TM	5/13/2001
2002	L5 TM	5/16/2002
2003	L7 ETM+	5/11/2003
2004	–	NA
2005	–	NA
2006	–	NA
2007	–	NA
2008	L5 TM	5/16/2008
2009	–	NA
2010	–	NA
2011	L5 TM	5/25/2011
2012	–	NA
2013	L8 OLI	5/14/2013
2014	L8 OLI	5/1/2014
2015	L8 OLI	5/20/2015
2016	L8 OLI	5/22/2016
2017	L8 OLI	5/25/2017
2018	L8 OLI	6/13/2018
2019	L8 OLI	5/30/2019
2020	L8 OLI	6/18/2020

Table 2. Possible gridcell values of the accuracy assessment.

Accuracy gridcell value	Meaning
	BR Analysis indicates that the area is …	Reference raster indicates the area is …
100	Not agriculture	Agriculture
101	Agriculture	Agriculture
200	Not agriculture	Not agriculture
201	Agriculture	Not agriculture

Table 3. Accuracy assessment results.

	Producer’s	User’s
Agriculture	75.5%	84.3%
Not agriculture	93.0%	88.4%
Overall accuracy	87.1%

Figure 2. Results of the combined band ratio analysis.

Map of combined band ratio analysis results. Extent of fields with growing crop is shown in green and extent of fallow fields with vegetation are shown in orange. An area of detail map shows a zoomed in area of these results in the Dih Sabz district.

Figure 3. Results of combined band ratio analysis, indicating ‘agricultural area’ for 1988 and 2020.

Two map frames show the results of the combined band ratio analysis for 1988 (left frame) and 2020 (right frame). Agricultural area is indicated by the extent of combined band ratio analysis in each frame.

Figure 4. Area of agriculture mapped within each district.

Line graph shows the area of agriculture (in square kilometers) by district for each year of analysis. The lines for the Kabul, Dih Sabz, Shakadara, and Bagrami districts indicate a range of areal extents that change over time – the Kabul and Bagrami lines both gradually decrease with time, and the Dih Sabz and Shakadara lines gradually increases with time.

Figure 5. Results of combined band ratio analysis for 1988 (left) and 2020 (right).

Two map frames show the results of the combined band ratio analysis for 1988 (left frame) and 2020 (right frame) aggregated to the 1 square kilometer grid. While this aggregation appears coarse at the map scale in the two static maps, the animation of similar map frames for each year of analysis is more readily understandable than an animation of the original (non-aggregated) versions of the results.

Data availability statement

The Landsat imagery used in this study is freely available and can be downloaded from the USGS Earth Explorer (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov). Other files, including the band ratio analysis results for each year and the urban land cover data are available at Sciencebase.gov under https://doi.org/10.5066/P9IC4QFW.