Object-oriented image analysis and change detection of land-use on Tenerife related to socio-economic conditions

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.