Abstract
This research aims to investigate how different landscape metrics are affected by the enhancement of the thematic classes in land cover/land use (LC/LU) maps. For this aim, three different LC/LU maps based on three different levels of CORINE (Coordination of Information on The Environment) nomenclature were created for the selected study area using GEOBIA (Geographic Object Based Image Analysis) techniques. First, second and third level LC/LU maps of the study area have five, thirteen and twenty-seven hierarchical thematic classes, respectively. High-resolution Spot 7 images with 1.5 m spatial resolution were used as the main Earth Observation data to create LC/LU maps. Additional geospatial data from open sources (OpenStreetMap and Wikimapia) were also integrated to the classification in order to identify some of the 2nd and 3rd level LC/LU classes. Classification procedure was initially conducted for Level 3 classes in which we developed decision trees to be used in object-based classification. Afterwards, Level 3 classes were merged to create Level 2 LC/LU map and then Level 2 classes were merged to create the Level 1 LC/LU map according to CORINE nomenclature. The accuracy of Level 1, Level 2, Level 3 maps are calculated as; 93.50%, 89.00%, 85.50% respectively. At the last stage, several landscape metrics such as Number of Patch (NP), Edge Density (ED), Largest Patch Index (LPI), Euclidean Nearest Neighbor Distance (ENN), Splitting Index (SPLIT) and Aggregation Index (AI) metrics and others were calculated for different level LC/LU maps and landscape metrics values were compared to analyze the impact of changing thematic details on landscape metrics. Our results show that, increasing the thematic detail allows landscape characteristics to be defined more precisely and ensure comprehensive assessment of cause and effect relationships between classes.
Highlights
The Earth’ surface changes constantly, by its natural dynamics, and due to human activities
3 different levels of land cover/land use (LC/LU) maps were produced according to CORINE nomenclature by applying Geographic Object Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) technique on multi-temporal SPOT 7 images
These thematic details could provide efficient and precise information on urban, transport, industrial, port areas that could be used as an input for variety of different applications ranging from landscape architecture to environmental studies
Summary
The Earth’ surface changes constantly, by its natural dynamics, and due to human activities. These changes, whether they are minor or major, local or global, affect the ecology and the human beings living on that ecosystem. Land cover is defined as the physical cover of Earth and land use describes how that land is used by humans. Together, they provide a baseline for many ecological and societal studies such as environmental models, weather and climate studies, hydrological and landscape planning studies, etc. There are different standard LC/LU systems developed by different agencies for various scales and needs, such as “National Land Cover Database (NLCD) of United States”, “United Nations Land cover maps (LCCS) of Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)” and CORINE (Coordination of Information on The Environment) project of European Union (EU) [4]
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