Land Cover Change Detection over Urban Stream's Drainage Area Using Landsat TM and ETM+ Images

The land use in suburban area has been changed rapidly due to the urban expansion in Korea during the last few decades. And such land use changes result in various environmental problems such as biodiversity decrease, habitat fragmentation, air pollution and urban heat island. Remote Sensing (RS) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can be used for land cover change detection to understand the impact and trend of the land use change. Change detection is the process of identifying differences in the state of an object or phenomenon by observing it at different times and it can provide quantitative and comparative information for the land use/cover change. RS is less expansive than field survey for producing land use maps, and can be accessed quickly and repetitively for large area. Also it can be used for change detection using multi-temporal land use/cover by accumulated data. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to detect and quantitatively evaluate urban land cover change in urban stream watershed area for the last few decades and ultimately to provide the basic data for urban land use planning and management.