Land use and land cover change monitoring in Bandırma (Turkey) using remote sensing and geographic information systems

There is a growing scholarly interest in monitoring and assessment of the impacts of land use and land cover changes (LULCC) on the environment. Recent technological developments and tools of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing (RS) facilitate the researches on this interest. This research aims at monitoring LULCC in Bandırma, Turkey over 30 years. This research utilizes GIS and RS techniques. Landsat satellite images of the years 1987, 2003, and 2019 are used in supervised classification methods with the maximum likelihood technique. The classified images show artificial surfaces, agricultural areas, forests, wetlands, and water bodies based on the first level classes of the Coordination of Information on the Environment (CORINE) land cover legend. Accuracy assessment is performed both before and after the correction process by using ArcGIS (10.6 Edition) software. The final overall Kappa values are above 0.95 for 3 years. These images are compared by using the Land Change Modeler tool of IDRISI (Selva Edition) software. The results represent that forest areas are increased and that wetlands are decreased in both 1987–2003 and 2003–2019 periods. Agricultural lands are decreased in the later period. Comparison maps demonstrate that land change from agricultural to artificial occurs (i) around existing settlements; (ii) along transportation axes; and (iii) in the locations of large urban land uses such as industrial areas, mines, and wind energy plants. The land change trend analysis shows that change from agricultural to artificial is the largest in the middle and southeastern parts of the area neighboring the Manyas Lake Ramsar conservation site.