Page 131 - Çevre Şehir ve İklim Dergisi İngilizce - Özel Sayı

Murat Arslan - Reyhan Çakir - İsra Akyazi
Nida Kumbasar - Ahmet Doğan - Emre Yavuz

1. Introduction

Land cover is defined by the European Environment Agency as the
biophysical cover that overlays the ground, and this description enables various
biophysical classes such as vegetation, hard surfaces and wet areas to be
classified. Land cover enables research on land use interpretation, monitoring
and evaluation, facilitation natural resource management, climate change
scenarios, carbon emission calculations and policy making (Wang et al., 2023).
The monitoring of the changes taking place in land cover is possible through
accurate and continuous mapping of the land and continuously monitoring
the changes taking place in agriculture, urbanization, and other biophysical
classes covering land, which serves as a guide in urban and regional planning,
as well as in environmental management.(Zhang ve Li, 2022).
Creating land cover maps through conventional methods requires providing
labor and funding costs. Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems
(GIS) technologies together enable the quick and dynamic monitoring, analysis,
and interpretation of land cover and the temporal changes occurring on it with
less cost and effort (Rujoiu-Mare & Mihai, 2016). Nowadays, land cover base
data is either produced by the individuals conducting the study within the
scope of their interests or obtained from existing global land cover datasets
that are available as open data. Considering the land cover data on a global
scale, global land cover / use maps in 9 classifications between the years,
2017-2023 were generated based on the satellite images from Sentinel-2 and
through the use of AI, and the The ‘Sentinel-2 Land Cover Explorer ’ interface
1
has been developed to monitor the changes occurring in classes (URL-1). As
part of the WorldCover project launched by the European Space Agency
2
(ESA), global-scale maps of 11 land classifications of the years, 2020 and 2021
were created through the use of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellite images
(URL-2). Additionally, considering at the studies implemented by institutions
in our country, the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) was created by the
General Directorate of Agricultural Reform using manually drawn maps with
30 cm resolution aerial photographs With LPIS, the land cover is categorized
into two main classes: agricultural land and non-agricultural land. Agricultural
land is made up of 16 sub-classes while non-agricultural land is made up of
9 sub-classes. As part of the CORINE (Coordination of Information on the
Environment) program, another land cover map covering the European
Continent with 44 classifications was created in 1990, and has been recreated
in 6-year intervals since 2000.

1 https://livingatlas.arcgis.com/landcoverexplorer/
2 https://esa-worldcover.org/en

118 Journal of Environment, Urban and Climate