Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
FRESENIUS ENVIRONMENTAL BULLETIN, cilt.25, sa.5, ss.1332-1342, 2016 (SCI-Expanded)
In order for assessing potential impacts of land development policies and orienting new policy actions for sustainable development, identification of spatial patterns in land use/cover and active drivers of change holds primary importance. As urban development and agricultural activities still have major roles in planning policy interventions in Turkey, spatial assessments on such land uses, on the experienced land cover flows and their organically linked functions need to be properly integrated into ex-ante/post policy analyses. A series of studies focused in the last decade on land use/cover issues and change dynamics especially after releases of European datasets on land cover. The presented study employs a number of spatial statistics for mainly exploring urban- and agriculture-related land cover changes in Turkey as part of the spatial assessments in relation to dependent economic and environmental variables. The assessments cover two data periods, 1990-2000 and 2000-2006. The results expose spatially explicit features on the distribution of urban/agricultural land cover in Turkey through a number of centrographic statistics and spatial autocorrelation measures. The results are aimed to better understand spatio-temporal trends and unveil spatially-clustered behaviours of different regions in reacting to the mechanisms that drive land cover changes.