Determination of the Impact of Urbanization in Istanbul Northern Forests by Remote Sensing

Abstract

Urban forests provide many benefits for the city’s resilience to climate change by improving the degree of shading, evaporative cooling, rainwater interception, and storage and filtration functions. With the increasing population and unplanned urbanization, the Northern Forests, which play a major role in Istanbul, are being destroyed over time. In this study, forest area changes were determined by using object-based classification and landscape metrics. Landsat TM and Landsat OLI and TIRS images dated from 2009 and 2019 were used to detect the forest area changes in the selected area. Selected landscape metrics such as the aggregation index, edge density, the largest patch index, and patch density were calculated from the classification results to understand the devastation of urbanization in forest areas. According to the results, forest areas decreased from 318.2 km² to 292.1 km², and were fragmented from whole and large pieces to smaller pieces.