Geographic Information and Remote Sensing in Planning
Year:2011 | Volume:2 | Issue:3|Papers Count:8

Today, advances in technology and industry have led to important and basic changes in the environment. In order to modify the destructive effects of environmental damage, the most important and yet the simplest way is to extend green space. In different countries, green space extension correlates with the natural environment and technological advances in the country. Green land use as a vital element of a city has undergone many changes and along with other profitable exercises has not been attended to. The aim of this study is to identify the green land use of region 10 of Mashhad Municipality based on the existing data and the inadequacy of public urban parks according to valid standards. Citing available statistics, the results showed that the green space per capita is 6.79 square meters which is lower than the amount per person in the country. However, there are fluctuations in the level of enjoyment of green space in the three districts of region 10; district 1 and district 2 with 4.9 and 4.1 square meters enjoy the most and the least green space per capita respectively. Based on the findings, the following suggestions are proposed: considering the fair distribution of green space in the studied area as important, taking site selection criteria into consideration in land use planning, employing up-to-date means and methods, such as GIS, in analyzing information and locating green space, investigating the social and psychological effects of urban green space, taking measures to hold control and to prepare the existing urban open land, and avoiding the change of proposed urban green space use found in the comprehensive and detailed urban plans of Mashhad.

Due to demographic, economic, social and cultural developments in recent decades, many advancements have occurred in the form of urbanization and urban development. The increasing development of urban society under the effect of these factors has led to unplanned and unrestrained expansion of constructions and cities as well as many changes in the environment. That is why environmental conscious design of cities is required. With respect to investments on urban, industrial, and tourism areas, many population and urbanization developments have occurred in the central part of Tabriz. For optimal planning and future sustainable urban development of this area, 13 different natural and human criteria were selected, evaluated, weighted according to acceptable standards of urban development, and integrated based on Analytical Hierarchy Process. Research results indicated that 2237 hectares of the central part of Tabriz are the most potential lands for urban development. Concerning the scatteredness of the lands suitable for this purpose, ARC MAP, population forecasting methods, and urban land standards were used and a piece of land for urban development was selected.

Today, LiDAR systems are used as a common technology to extract three-dimensional information which provide the possibility of fast and accurate generation of surface models. In LiDAR data correction process, systematic errors must be modeled based on LiDAR system calibration. Calibration process improves systematic errors by using LiDAR equation and raw measurements of GPS, the INS and laser scanner. Considering the impact of the calibration on the results optimal flight planning can be designed and by evaluating the compatibility degree between the footprints in overlapping strips, data quality control can be estimated. This paper suggests an approach for the quality control of the LiDAR point cloud. To evaluate the quality control the proposed method includes three steps: Primitives Extraction and Matching, Similarity Measure, Noise Level Verification. Finally, the results of each step are evaluated with an experimental test.

Natural disasters are considered hostile to human beings killing thousands and leaving millions of casualties and homeless people annually. There are 43 kinds of natural disasters diagnosed in global level as well as 33 items in Iran. Mass movement is a destructive phenomenon in which man as an accelerating factor plays an inevitable role in rate and velocity of degradation. Mass movement is influenced by different factors such as vegetation cover, life form, and erosion which may be altered by natural factors and human activities.This study measured the effects of some watershed management projects on the vegetation cover, life form, and erosion on the site across Darkesh watershed located in Taleghan, Iran. The results indicated that watershed management projects had positive effects on vegetation cover, life form, erosion, and finally, on controlling of mass movement.

The use of GIS and remote sensing to estimate basin runoff has increased in recent years. In this study, curve number and runoff maps of maximum rainfall of 6 hours with 2 year return period were required to map the height of the runoff. Runoff curve number maps were provided in the GIS environment with ArcCN-Runoff. Since runoff curve number is determined based on factors such as soil hydrology, land use, land cover, and hydrological conditions, ETM+images of 2002 in Erdas software and supervised classification were used to develop the land cover map. In addition, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was used and accordingly pastures were categorized as good and medium, and forests as dense and mid dense. Maps of maximum rainfall of 6 hours were drawn based on the relations and equations of the raining basin by using the DEM map in the GIS environment. Integrating the obtained maps and the equations, the runoff height map was drawn. As a result, the average runoff was 3.18 mm which is more accurate than the findings of traditional methods (about 3.98 mm).

Forest fire causes devastating destruction of forest as an important part of human environment, releases damaging atmospheric emissions and can be a threat to public health. It is one of the instances of natural crises and how to cope with it is an example of crisis management. Identifying the influential factors in the occurrence and propagation of forest fire and allocating resources in a proper manner considering risk zone mapping and their relationship with geographical and vegetation aspects are crucial for fire prevention and preparedness policies. Therefore, analytical process hierarchy (APH), geographic information systems (GIS), and remote sensing (RS) methods were applied to prepare fire risk maps for 30000-hectare-wide protected area of Manesht and Ghalarang in Ilam province. Investigating high risk zones and geographical aspects of the region, several naturally occurring fire breaks were recognized and used to divide this area into 33 subdivisions in order to decide about proper action plans on fire times. Results showed that human-started fires were the major cause of forest fire in this region. Among the many factors considered, vegetation thickness had very dominant effects on fire propagation. The findings were used to give some instructions on fire crisis management in the protected area including the three phases of preliminary action or activity before occurrence (prevention scheme), action during on occurrence (collation scheme), and action after occurrence (renovation scheme).

GIS with its related techniques is one of the advanced and new tools used in archeology. This study investigated the application of GIS in spatial and environmental analysis of archeological sites around Bampur River. For this purpose, all the descriptive and locational information related to archeological sites and their spatial analysis was collected, categorized, converted and entered into geographical information systems. The most important parts of spatial database layers such as topography map, river networks, water resources, digital elevation map and land use layer and situation of sites were investigated. In addition to correct and fast access to large volumes of the required information, the possibility of presenting and illustrating locational and subjective information in the form of maps and tables was provided. In the attempt to reveal the relationship between natural environment and Bronze Age sites, various analyzing capabilities of GIS such as buffering and query were used. Eventually, the role and importance of Bampur River in the formation and demolition of archeological sites of the third millennium B.C. was investigated. It can be said that in this region, Bampur River had a vital role in settlements of the third millennium, and their rises and falls depended on the fluctuations in the river. It should be noted that the density of the archaeological sites in each period was different; only periodIV with the largest settlement witnessed the outstanding progress of the area and Bampur Tepe had a major role in cross-border trade.

Mapping land use and land cover (LULC) at regional scales is essential for a wide range of studies such as landslide, erosion, and land planning. In this study, LULC map was investigated by using Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Lohran and kash, northwest Alborz province. Multi-spectral and panchromatic ETM+images (exceptional temporal band) were used for land use mapping. The images were geometrically corrected and orthorectified using GCPs and DEM. Then the two methods of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and supervised classification were used in order to detect changes in the region’s land use. Accuracy assessment of classification results was made with ground truth map. The best land use classification was the comparison of maximum likelihood classification method with algorithm according to which the overall accuracy of 96% and kappa coefficient of 0.93 was observed for 2002.