Managing land use/cover data harmonized to support land administration and environmental applications in Turkey

Abstract

Land use / land cover (LULC) data is used in various application domains including land administration and environmental applications. Land cover data presents the physical coverage of the earth's surface while land use data presents its socio-economic functionality. A common definition and classification system is required to combine these data. In this way, according to user requirements in Turkey, coordination of information on the environment (CORINE) database which defines land cover classes in three data-use level was extended by creating a standard definition system at large scaled data use level. Harmonized LULC data model with five levels was produced from national to local level. LULC data at large scaled data use level was produced for Trabzon City to examine the applicability of the proposed model. This LULC data were generalized to other data use levels with the using of the LULC data model. Case studies showed that managing LULC data harmonized are successful to promote the multiple uses of LULC data in various environmental applications effectively.