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Over the last few decades, dramatic land-use changes have occurred throughout Israel. Previously-grazed areas have been afforested, converted to irrigated or rain-fed agriculture, turned into natural reserves, often used as large military training sites, converted to rural and urban settlements, or left unused. Land-use maps provided by the Israeli governmental are more detailed for agricultural and urban land-use classes than for others. While rangelands still account for a substantial part of the northern Negev, their extent today is not well defined. In light of continuous land-use changes and lack of regard to rangelands in existing land-use maps, there is a need for creating a current land-use information database, to be utilized by planners, scientists, and decision makers. Remote-sensing (RS) data are a viable source of data from which land-use maps could be created and updated efficiently. The purpose of this …