Use of lacunarity index to characterize sub-urban areas for land use planning using IKONOS-2 multispectral imagery

Urban planners need tools to help characterise land use, and in this work a tool has been developed for helping this process by measuring the distribution of green parkland and urban areas and displaying the results in a visual way. Two landscape metrics and a patch size metric. These metrics were chosen as they characterize both the size and distribution of the patches of land use. Land use was classified into vegetative and nonvegetative patches using the normalized difference vegetative index (NDVI). The data set was high resolution IKONOS data combined with UK ordnance survey data to aid classification by ensuring that major roads were correctly identified.