Abstract Farming and food production for the increasing world’s population require proper preparation of a diverse range of environmental parameters especially water availability and accessibility. This study investigated the effect of water scarcity on crop selection and spatial pattern of croplands in an agricultural landscape in central Iran. Towards this aim, the main crops including wheat, alfalfa, potato, fruit trees, rice and vegetables were mapped using a combination of decision tree and object-based classifiers and four Landsat 8 images acquired from March 2015 to June 2015 with Kappa Coefficient and Overall Accuracy of 80.16 and 85.37 percent, respectively. Groundwater depth as an indicator of water availability was mapped by interpolating over 13 thousand wells and, according to the ability of farmers and available technologies to extract water, classified into four groundwater level areas (GLA). Finally, spatial pattern of crops in each GLA was investigated using four landscape-level metrics including Mean Patch Size (MPS), Mean Nearest-Neighbor distance (MNN), Contagion index (CONTAG) and Shannon's diversity (SHDI). The results of this study showed that cropping system in drier areas has shifted towards monoculture (crops with fewer water requirements such as wheat) and led to a fragmented and homogeneous landscape with large and low dispersed agricultural units. It was finally concluded that changes in crop selection and spatial pattern of croplands could be considered and applied as a precise and fast indicator of determining water availability and accessibility over large geographical regions in Iran.

中文翻译：

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评估水资源短缺对伊朗中部作物选择和农田空间格局的影响

摘要 世界人口不断增长的农业和粮食生产需要适当准备各种环境参数，尤其是水的可用性和可及性。本研究调查了水资源短缺对伊朗中部农业景观中作物选择和农田空间格局的影响。为实现这一目标，使用决策树和基于对象的分类器以及从 2015 年 3 月至 2015 年 6 月获取的四张具有 Kappa 系数和总体的 Landsat 8 图像，绘制了包括小麦、苜蓿、马铃薯、果树、水稻和蔬菜在内的主要作物准确率分别为 80.16% 和 85.37%。通过内插超过 13,000 口井，绘制了地下水深度作为可用水量指标的地图，根据农民的能力和可用的取水技术，分为四个地下水位区（GLA）。最后，每个 GLA 中作物的空间格局使用四个景观级指标进行调查，包括平均斑块大小 (MPS)、平均最近邻距离 (MNN)、传染指数 (CONTAG) 和香农多样性 (SHDI)。这项研究的结果表明，干旱地区的种植系统已转向单一栽培（小麦等需水量较少的作物），并导致农业单元大而分散的分散和同质景观。