Land Use Change Detection with Remote Sensing Technologies of Bolu Province

Land cover changes in Bolu Province were investigated in this study. Natural environment has changed in recent years due to human activities in this field.Environmental degradation from human pressure and improper land use has become a major problem in our study area because of the population growth, urbanization rate and the associated rapid depletion of natural resources. The activities of human have led to a change on the natural environment and processes against them. So, physical geography particularly natural processes faced some important unnatural varying. Land cover changes due to rapid population growth and high rates of urbanization in the study area are a good example of the human pressure. When studying the cost of land degradation it is not possible to ignore the role of urbanization in particular, a major cause of deforestation is conversion to urban land. Characters of land cover change in Bolu Province were analyzed on different time series (1990 - 2010) of the Landsat satellite imagery data using Remote Sensing Technologies. This procedure was carried out with Erdas Image Analysis Program. The result of analysis showed that expansion of urban areas against it contracted of forests and green areas. Analysis of satellite images also showed that as a result of urbanization and high human population densities changed natural geographical structure to anthropogenic land cover types.