Land use in Shahre Rey has experienced unprecedented growth in urban areas in recent decades. Land use changes affect social, economic, and environmental conditions. Gathering information about these changes is essential for better planning and management of urban areas in sustainable development. Consequently, the object of this paper is to better examine the Shahre Rey land use changes affected by urban development and to investigate urban landscape integrity using the 1988-2018 "Fragmentation" index. Moreover, it was intended to provide solutions for the determination of hot spots based on appropriate criteria. With the help of Landsat satellite images, four land uses – including urban landscapes, agricultural lands, green spaces, and barren lands – were extracted and the extent of land use changes was determined. In order to investigate the fragmentation of Shahre Rey landscape, the metrics of the number of patches, patch density, and the largest patch were used. Cross-Tab was also used in a part of the study. The results showed that the land use areas of ​​urban lands and urban green space had increased by 369.7 and 55.6 hectares, respectively, while agricultural lands and barren lands had decreased by 213.8 and 211.5 hectares, respectively. In urban land use, integration had increased. In the green space and agriculture land uses, fragmentation has increased due to the creation and construction of roads. Based on the criteria of  "position relative to borders and roads as well as the area and size of patches,'' solutions were made to determine the "hot spots" of vegetation and residential areas to help making plans for the improvement of their conditions. The reason is that land use change, especially the loss of vegetation, has a negative impact on the landscape.

Integrity and connectivity of habitats are among the important factors for the conservation of plant and animal populations within protected areas, particularly when the habitats are connected. Investigating on the integrity of these areas could help interconnecting islanded patches and preventing the negative impacts of fragmentations. This study aimed to quantify the fragmentations of different regions within the protected area of Jajroud. Land-use map was extracted using remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) techniques. The acquired data were employed to study the fragmentation of the regions considering the landscape metrics. The results indicate that the northern parts of the region, including the national parks of Khojir and Sorkheh Hesar, in general, possess larger patches and a higher level of connectivity, while the southern part is tending towards small-grain structure. In addition, results support the applicability of landscape metrics in assessing the management of the protected areas and identifying the protection patches in order to prioritize the protection of landscape patches.

Landscape fragmentation, due to the roads construction, urban infrastructure development and other land uses, seems to be in result of the loss of habitat in protected areas. Indeed, Landscape fragmentation causes a huge negative impact on wildlife, including important species. In result, the monitoring and management of protected areas, through the landscape ecology and quantification of fragmentation, will be so applicable. This research aims to quantify the landscape fragmentation in Kolah Ghazy national Park and wildlife refuge. To achieve this purpose, RS and GIS techniques were used to extract land uses in studied area and then landscape fragmentation was quantified using landscape metrics (CA, CAP, TE, MSI, NP, MPS and MNN) in class level. The results cleared that rich rangeland patches have been more integrated, but the incompatible land uses, such as mining, agriculture and urban infrastructure development make these patches to be more far away from each other, so, reduction of incompatible land uses is recommended in the region.