Spatio-temporal land use/land cover changes analysis and monitoring in the Valencia Municipality, Spain

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Issues of land use/land cover changes and the direct or indirect relationships of these changes have drawn much attention in recent years. In the Mediterranean Spain, observed environmental changes influenced with dramatic urban growth and their likely changes can have extensive unforeseen ramification. Thus, the objectives of this research were to map and determine the nature, extent and rate of changes and to analyze the spatio-temporal land use/land cover change patterns and fragmentation that has occurred in Valencia Municipality. Multi-temporal Landsat MSS1976, TM1992 and ETM2001 images were acquired. Digital orthophotos, IKONOS images and existing Corine land cover maps were used as reference. More than 130 training samples were selected for classification of the Landsat images using supervised method parallelepiped-maximum likelihood algorithm in ERDAS Imagine 9.1, and land cover maps were generated and change detection analysis was performed.(...)