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National Scale Land Cover Classification and Monitoring System

(Sertel et al., 2018). For our country, which is one of the 39 member
countries of the program, maps were manually produced by the Turkish
Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT) in 2000, by the Ministry of Food, Agriculture
and Livestock in 2006, and for the years 2012 and 2018, by the Ministry of
Agriculture and Forestry of the Republic of Turkey, and subsequently shared
with the European Environment Agency and added to the European land
cover maps (URL-3). Through the collaboration of Ministry of Environment,
Urbanization and Ministry of National Defense, as of 2024, the the CORINE
maps will be created by the General Directorate of Mapping.
There are important points to consider while using global-scale land cover
maps in local studies. The accuracy of the map created may be sufficient in
global-scale practices, but insufficient in local -scale ones. Moreover, it is
important to use global-scale maps in multi-purpose land (such as agriculture
and forestry) with heterogenous structure and varying in topography (Aryal
et al., 2023). As for our country, the land cover has variable topography over
short distances and a heterogenous structure. When the existing global-
scale land cover maps are to be used, they are insufficient as they do not
match our country’s land cover classes, their resolutions, and update periods.
For these reasons, there seems to be a lack of a sytem that will produce and
monitor a comprehensive land cover map at a national scale with land cover
classifications specific to our country.
This study aims to produce a national-scale land cover map to bridge this
gap. To this end, the National Land Cover Classification and Monitoring System
(UASIS) project was initiated in 2018 with a feasibility study, in collaboration
with the General Directorate of Combating Desertification and Erosion and
the Informatics and Information Security Advanced Technologies Research
Center of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK
BİLGEM). The UASIS project aims to establish an open-source national system
that can semi-automatically produce and monitor the land cover classes specific
to our country at a national scale through the use of artificial intelligence and
machine learning technologies, and monitor the national land cover at regular
intervals. The technical information summary of what has become UASIS today
in line with the intended goal, is shown in Table 1.

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Special Issue / 2024