Iran (Persian: ایران‎ Irān [ʔiːˈɾɒːn] (About this soundlisten)), also called Persia,[11] and officially the Islamic Republic of Iran,[a] is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered to the northwest by Armenia and Azerbaijan,[b] to the north by the Caspian Sea, to the northeast by Turkmenistan, to the east by Afghanistan, to the southeast by Pakistan, to the south by the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, and to the west by Turkey and Iraq. Iran covers an area of 1,648,195 km2 (636,372 sq mi), with a population of 85 million.[12] It is the second-largest country in the Middle East (after Saudi Arabia), the sixth-largest entirely in Asia, and its capital and largest city is Tehran.

Land serves as a vital production resource, and therefore, land planning plays an important role in sustainable land-use design. Increasing the global population alters landscapes via land-use and land-cover change across different landscapes, including the drylands. Iran includes large areas of dryland, where the population increased by 60% from 1985 to 2016. Further population increase in Iran would require more land resources to be allocated for human needs. However, the pace and patterns of these changes remain unclear. The aim of this study was to map land-cover change from 1985 to 2016 and predict future land-cover change in the Zayandehrood ecologic sub-basins of Central Iran. By using multiseasonal Landsat imagery, nine thematic classes were mapped with a random forest classifier for 1985, 1998, and 2016 with an overall accuracy of 80% for each period. Classification results revealed that from 1985 to 2016 residential areas doubled and industrial areas increased at the expense of rangelands. Our study also revealed cropland expansion at the expense of rangelands, cropland abandonment and contraction of croplands due to residential and industrial development. Prediction of changes by 2036 with a multi-layer perceptron neural network and Markov chain analysis revealed further expansion of industries and residencies particularly nearby the protected areas such as Ghamashlu Wildlife Refuge. Predicted contraction of some degraded agricultural lands and concomitant agricultural expansion in the agricultural frontier by 2036, underscore the importance of sustainable land management in highly arid areas of Iran and improvement of the strategies for the protection of rangelands.