Since Spanish colonial times, the Canary Islands and especially Tenerife have always been used for intensive agriculture.
Today almost 1/4 of the total area of Tenerife are agriculturally affected, whereas especially mountainous areas with
suitable climate conditions are drastically transformed for agricultural use by building of large terraces. In recent years,
political and economical developments lead to a further transformation process, especially inducted by an expansive
tourism, which caused concentration- and intensification-tendencies of agricultural land use in lower altitudes as well as
agricultural set-aside and rural exodus in the hinterland. The overall aim of the research at hand is to address the
agricultural land use dynamics of the past decades, to statistically assess the causal reasons for those changes and to
model the future agricultural land use dynamics on Tenerife. Therefore, an object-based classification procedure for
recent RapidEye data (2010), Spot 4 (1998) as well as SPOT 1 (1986-88) imagery was developed, followed by a post
classification comparison (PCC). Older agricultural fallow land or agricultural set-aside with a higher level of natural
succession can hardly be acquired in the used medium satellite imagery. Hence, a second detection technique was
generated, which allows an exact identification of the total agriculturally affected area on Tenerife, also containing older
agricultural fallow land or agricultural set-aside. The method consists of an automatic texture-oriented detection and
area-wide extraction of linear agricultural structures (plough furrows and field boundaries of arable land, utilised and
non-utilised agricultural terraces) in current orthophotos of Tenerife. Once the change detection analysis is realised, it is
necessary to identify the different driving forces which are responsible for the agricultural land use dynamics. The
statistical connections between agricultural land use changes and these driving forces are identified by the use of
correlation and regression analyses.
The island Tenerife is a popular destination for tourists, especially from European countries. From the middle
of the 1970s, the mass tourism increased from about 1.3 million to 6 million tourists nowadays (2008).1 This
development lead not only to an increasing expansion of infrastructure but also to a spatial concentration of
settlements.2 Moreover, the Canary Islands and especially Tenerife are a hotspot of climate change with possible
reorientation of atmospheric circulation. The presented research project follows the question how sensitive
ecosystems (e.g. laurel forest or pinewood) on Tenerife will be affected by, on the one hand, global impacts
of climate change and on the other hand by local socioeconomic effects in future. For this purpose existing
time series of land cover and land use change, derived from medium spatial scaled remotely sensed data, will be
upgraded with regard to the spatial and temporal resolution. Therefore an object-based classification of high
spatial scaled satellite scenes has to be done followed by a change detection analysis. Taking into account the
different local and global driving forces for these changes the spatial future development of the most important
land use processes like e.g. increase of agricultural land (monocultures) and fallow land will then be simulated
and visualised. Based on these results the impacts for different sensitive ecosystems can finally be analysed and
valuated.
One of the major accompaniments of the globalization is the rapid growing of urban areas. Urban sprawl is the main
environmental problem affecting those cities across different characteristics and continents. Various reasons for the
increase in urban sprawl in the last 10 to 30 years have been proposed [1], and often depend on the socio-economic
situation of cities. The quantitative reduction and the sustainable handling of land should be performed by inner urban
development instead of expanding urban regions. Following the principal "spare the urban fringe, develop the inner
suburbs first" requires differentiated tools allowing for quantitative and qualitative appraisals of current building
potentials. Using spatial high resolution remote sensing data within an object-based approach enables the detection of
potential areas while GIS-data provides information for the quantitative valuation.
This paper presents techniques for modeling urban environment and opportunities of utilization of the retrieved
information for urban planners and their special needs.
The island Tenerife is characterized by an increasing tourism, which causes an enormous change of the socio-economic situation and a rural exodus. This development leads - beside for example sociocultural issues - to fallow land, decreasing settlements, land wasting etc., as well as to an economic and ecological problem. This causes to a growing interest in geoecological aspects and to an increasing demand for an adequate monitoring database. In order to study the change of land use and land cover, the technology of remote sensing (LANDSAT 3 MSS and 7 ETM+, orthophotos) and geographical information systems were used to analyze the spatial pattern and its spatial temporal changes of land use from end of the 70s to the present in different scales. Because of the heterogeneous landscape and the unsatisfactory experience with pixel-based classification of the same area, object-oriented image analysis techniques have been applied to classify the remote sensed data. A post-classification application was implemented to detect spatial and categorical land use and land cover changes, which have been clipped with the socio-economic data within GIS to derive the driving forces of the changes and their variability in time and space.
Conference Committee Involvement (1)
Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring, GIS Applications, and Geology V
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