Deriving current land-use information for metropolitan transportation planning through integration of remotely sensed data and GIS

Transportation planners and metropolitan planning organizations require up-to-date land-use information to allocate transportation resources and to forecast the location and type of growth within metropolitan areas and associated increases in transportation volumes. For rapidly changing areas, extant geographic databases may not contain current land-use information. Other layers in the GIS database have potential for aiding image-based procedures far updating land-use layers. Results from the fir st of two case studies suggest that land-use change detection using high spatial resolution imagery is useful for detecting individual change features, but that automatic delineation of these features yields imprecise boundaries, such that interactive delineation is likely to be required. Results from the second case study indicate that many GIS data layers maintained by metropolitan planning organizations provide useful information for determining current land use when combined with interactive identification of land-use category from high resolution image data.