Full Length Research Paper

Managing land use/cover data harmonized to support land administration and environmental applications in Turkey

Arif Cagdas Aydinoglu^1*, Tahsin Yomralioglu¹, Halil Ibrahim Inan² and Faik Ahmet Sesli³

¹Department of Geomatics Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering, Istanbul Technical University, 34469 Maslak Istanbul, Turkey.

²Department of Geomatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Karadeniz Technical University, 61080 Trabzon, Turkey.

³Department of Geomatics Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Ondokuz Mayis University, Samsun, Turkey.

*Corresponding author. E-mail: aaydinoglu@itu.edu.tr, arifcagdas@gmail.com.  Tel: +90 212 285 3782.

Accepted 21 January, 2010

   Abstract

Land Use / land cover (LULC) data is used in various application domains including land administration and environmental applications. Land cover data presents the physical coverage of the Earth’s surface while land use data presents its socio-economic functionality. A common definition and classification system is required to combine these data. In this way, according to user requirements in Turkey, coordination of information on the environment (CORINE) database which defines land cover classes in three data-use level was extended by creating a standard definition system at large scaled data use level. Harmonized LULC data model with five levels was produced from national to local level. LULC data at large scaled data use level was produced for Trabzon City to examine the applicability of the proposed model. This LULC data were generalized to other data use levels with the using of the LULC data model. Case studies showed that managing LULC data harmonized are successful to promote the multiple uses of LULC data in various environmental applications effectively.

Key words: Land use, land cover, CORINE database, data model, geographical information systems, remote sensing.