DETECTION OF LAND-USE AND LAND COVER CHANGES

Abstract

Florida Panhandle region has been experiencing rapid land transformation in the recent decades. To quantify land use and land-cover (LULC) changes and other landscape changes in this area, three counties including Franklin, Liberty and Gulf were taken as a case study and an unsupervised classification approach implemented to Landsat TM images acquired from 1985 to 2005 provided a time-series of land use and land-cover data sets. Land-cover change maps derived from post-classification comparison provided information on the spatial distribution and types as well as amount of land cover changes. Results indicated that urban increased during past 20 years, especially in the second ten years, while forest/woody wetland increased in the first ten year but decreased in the second ten years. These data sets provide basic information fo{tither research such as land management and planning.