Environmental Monitoring of Spatio-Temporal Changes in Northern Istanbul using Remote Sensing and GIS

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the landscape transformation and the effect of the third Bosphorus Bridge construction works on the natural ecosystem over seven years’ time in two districts, Beykoz and Sariyer, located at the northern part of Asian and European Istanbul. The study applied supervised classification-maximum likelihood algorithm to monitor land cover changes using multi-temporal satellite data of Landsat covering study area for the years of 2009 and 2016. The overall classification accuracies are 92.36% with Kappa statistic of 0.89 for 2009 and 91.25% with Kappa statistic of 0.89 for the year 2016. The current study resulted with a rapid land cover change at the study area with approximately 4% and %1 decrease in forest and green area, 2% increase in both agricultural and urban/build up areas. Additionally, the destroyed area increased with approximately 1% of the study area in the 7 years period.