A Case Study of the Risk Zones under the Pressure of Urbanization by GIS and Remote Sensing

The analysis of land use changes is essential to evaluate the ecological consequence of urbanization and anthropogenic pressure, and, more importantly, it can provide basic information for appropriate decision-making. In fact, urban development can impact environmental quality and ecosystem services. Major urbanization phenomenon is often accompanied by green component and natural resources areas. Instead of using traditional analysis methods which have a long period of applications and problems with large amounts of data, we chose to use remote sensing and GIS to derive the land use information and to perform the spatial analysis. In the case study, Istanbul is a metropolitan area where the spatial growth is rapid; due to population growing and urbanization, the Instanbul agglomeration is effectively forced on Tekirdag, on the Marmara Sea coast of Thrace. Nowadays, the 90% of Tekirdag lands are productive agricultural ones, 54% of which are composed by rich agricultural soil; in the studying region, about 10700 ha of green area, ecological sensitive areas (legally conserved by European Wildlife and Natural Habitat) and an Ergene Water Basin, which vitalize the Thrace sub region, are present. Threat of industry, growing population and urbanization indicate that Tekirdag will have irrevocable environmental problems in the future. This paper presents a first analysis of the risk zones under urbanization pressure close to Tekirdag by using GIS and Remote Sensing instruments. Consecutive processes such as image enhancement, emerging and re-sampling are applied to high resolution satellite data, to prepare it for analysis and interpretation with image classification. Entire procedure are approached with the GIS Free and Open Source GRASS and with the commercial software ERDAS IMAGINE.