Land use is driven by the interplay of economic, social and environmental factors. Good land management aims to find the right balance of these, often competing, factors, leading to a sustainable urban & regional land use. To achieve this, cities and regions need land use information. This information must not only cover the current state of the land, it should also evaluate the evolution over the last years and predict future trends.
Remote sensing methods can be employed to detect different land use types in a practical, economical and repetitive fashion, without facing typical problems with borders to cross or areas that are difficult to reach. This makes satellite data and its resulting applications an important input for reliable and timely land monitoring tools.
As metropolitan areas are growing and changing at unprecedented rates it is important to provide spatio-temporal data which can illustrate where changes have occurred and quantify the rate of urban sprawl and thus loss of green space. This kind of data can be used as a basis for understanding urban growth changes within a historical perspective.
Fig.1 shows the land use evolution – urban sprawl in the periphery of Lille. The images show the construction of a new highway and some residential areas. © SPOTimage
In that upset, EUROSENSE created a “land use change map” of the “Metropole Area Lille”. A comparison in soil occupation between 1993 and 2006 was performed using archive SPOT imagery. A SPOT5 image mosaic (2.5m resolution) from 2006 was compared to a corresponding dataset from 1993 using SPOT2 10m resolution satellite images.
The changes over this 13-year period were mapped using on-screen change detection methods, providing an accurate delineation and interpretation of land use evolutions. Combining these changes with the formerly created Urban Atlas 2006 resulted in a “historical” Urban Atlas map of 1993 over the Metropole Area Lille.
Fig.2 shows the land use evolution between 1993 and 2006, clear changes are visible between both Urban Atlas maps. The land use changes are delineated in black. © EUROSENSE
The production of this change map was realised by EUROSENSE within the project “GSE Land” (GMES Service Element), funded by ESA – www.gmes-gseland.info.
“Urban Atlas” is a European initiative; its purpose is to map the largest European cities according to a fixed procedure and legend. This legend consists of 26 different classes (derived from the CORINE and MOLAND nomenclature) with focus on artificial areas. Through this initiative it will be possible to compare the land use of different European cities and follow it up in time. The Urban Atlas constitutes also the basis for the calculations of different Urban Audit indicators/statistics.
The realisation of the project was a cooperation between the Intercommunale Leiedal, the province of West Flanders, l’Agence de Développement et d’Urbanisme de Lille Métropole and EUROSENSE.
EUROSENSE has a great expertise in the processing of satellite images. EUROSENSE has no limitations concerning satellite type or resolution. We have profound experience in the processing of a large spectrum of optical and radar satellite images (FORMOSAT, KOMPSAT, SPOT, IKONOS, Landsat, TerraSAR-X …).
For more information on these services, we refer to the following contact information:
EUROSENSE Belfotop N.V Belgium
Address: Nerviërslaan 54, B-1780 Wemmel, BELGIUM
Phone: +32 (0)2 460 70 00
Fax: +32 (0)2 460 49 58
Website: http://www.eurosense.com