Istanbul is the most populated city of Turkey with a population of around 10.58 M (2000) living on around 5,750 km2. In 1980, the population was only 4.7 M and then it has been more than doubled in only two decades. The population has been increasing as a result of mass immigration. An urbanization process continues and it causes serious increases in urban areas while decreasing the amount of green areas. This rapid, uncontrolled, and illegal urbanization accompanied by insufficient infrastructure has caused degradation of forest and barren lands in the metropolitan area, especially through the last two decades. The watershed basins inside the metropolitan area and the transportation network have accelerated the land-cover changes, which have negative impacts on water quality of the basins. Monitoring urban growth and land cover change will enable better management of this complex urban area by the Greater Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (GIMM). A temporal assessment of land-cover changes of Istanbul has been documented in this study. The study mainly focuses on the acquisition and analysis of Landsat TM and Landsat GeoCover LC satellite images reflecting the significant land-cover changes between the years of 1990 and 2005. Raster data were converted to vector data and used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). A database was created for Istanbul metropolitan area to plan, manage, and utilize statistical attribute data covering population, water, forest, industry, and topographic position. Consequently an overlay analysis was carried out and land use/cover changes through years have been detected for the case study area. The capability of Landsat images in determining the alterations in the macro form of the city are also discussed.

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Although the Historic Peninsula of old Istanbul was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985, complete documentation of this important area has not yet been carried out. In 2006 the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s Historical Environment Protection Directorate initiated the “Historic Peninsula Project”, which covers an area of 1500 ha and includes approximately 48 000 buildings in crowded and frequently narrow streets. BİMTAŞ, a company owned by the Municipality, immediately started the documentation of all buildings in the project area using terrestrial laser scanning. This created the challenge of building up an efficient production environment with new high‐end technology to fulfil the requirements of this project in a very short timeframe of 2 years. This paper describes the entire production environment for documentation of all buildings, detailing the frequent adaptations of the process resulting from learning on the job. Although the data acquisition and mapping environment was established in the course of production, it was always essential to optimise the technical solutions in order to meet the requirements for data quality and delivery deadlines. Only 80 ha of the required 1500 ha was completed using static scanning during the first 6 months, thus requiring a change from static to mobile terrestrial laser scanning in order to accelerate the work and to conclude the scanning phase for the remaining major area within 3 months.

The effect of land cover change, from natural to anthropogenic, on physical geography conditions has been studied in Kayisdagi Mountain. Land degradation is the most important environmental issue involved in this study. Most forms of land degradation are natural processes accelerated by human activity. Land degradation is a human induced or natural process that negatively affects the ability of land to function effectively within an ecosystem. Environmental degradation from human pressure and land use has become a major problem in the study area because of high population growth, urbanization rate, and the associated rapid depletion of natural resources. 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. The paper reviews the principles of current remote sensing techniques considered particularly suitable for monitoring Kayisdagi Mountain and its surrounding land cover changes and their effects on physical geography conditions. In addition, this paper addresses the problem of how spatially explicit information about degradation processes in the study area rangelands can be derived from different time series of satellite data. The monitoring approach comprises the time period between 1990 and 2005. Satellite remote sensing techniques have proven to be cost effective in widespread land cover changes. Physical geography and particularly natural geomorphologic processes like erosion, mass movement, physical weathering, and chemical weathering features etc. have faced significant unnatural variation.