Application of SPOT data for regional growth analysis and local planning

SPOT satellite data, combined with state-of-the-art image processing and GIS technology, are valuable tools for timely and accurate analyses of regional urban and suburban development. A combination of unsupervised classification and image interpretation techniques can be used for land-usefland-cover analysis and to determine regional growth patterns. With this procedure, accuracies for growth detection as high as 93 percent may be achieved and verified by a rigorous error analysis. Once incorporated in a GIS database, areas can be measured and the spatial distribution of growth patterns can be analyzed. Existing digitized map data or GIS layers such as zoning maps may then be overlayed and compared with the actual land-usefland-cover information. Discrepancies can then be quickly identified and analyzed. The data can also be used to update GIs files. It is shown that merged SPOT multispectral and panchromatic data can be effectively used in a GIS environment to routinely map and monitor land-use change at scales of 1:22,000 and smaller.