Impacts of Land Use Change on Water Basin Using Remote Sensing and Geographical Information System

Abstract

The population in Istanbul 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 natural environment. This uncontrolled and illegal urbanization accompanied by insufficient infrastructure has caused degradation of cropland and forested areas in the metropolitan area, especially in water basin area. The watershed basins inside the metropolitan area have accelerated the land-cover changes, which have negative impacts on water quality of the basins. The Terkos water basin, one of the seven water basins of Istanbul providing drinking water, was selected as a study area. In order to understand the effect of the land use change of the water basin in Istanbul Metropolitan Area, we used the three Landsat satellite images of the years 1995, 2005 and 2010. The study mainly focuses on the acquisition and analysis of Landsat TM satellite images reflecting the significant land-cover changes between the years of 1995 and 2010. The findings show that the settlement areas emerged mainly on the protection zones of the Terkos basin and created serious environmental problems. The land use change will effect precipitation change on direct surface runoff in water basin.

Effects of Deforestation and Anthropogenic Aspects on Streamflow in the Mau Forest Catchments in Kenya: Hydrological Modelling of Surface Water Yields from Sondu River Basin

“…Changes in land use tend to alter land surface cover which has a significant influence on the catchment hydrology (12). Pressure on land resources for purposes of providing food, water, and shelter to the ever-growing human population has brought about notable changes in LULC with corresponding impacts on hydrological regimes of watershed areas (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19). Among the most notable LULC changes that impact a catchment's surface water yield is deforestation; the permanent alteration of a forest to another on-forest use such as agriculture or urban development (20)(21)(22)(23)(24).…”

Effect of land use change on hydrology of forested watersheds

“…All stream networks within the watershed ends up in the Terkos Lake. Although the water resources in Terkos Basin are highly important for the Istanbul, only a few studies have investigated the effects of LUCCs (Geymen, 2016; Kucukmehmetoglu & Geymen, 2008) in the region. Thus, the aims of this study are (1) to simulate possible future land use change scenarios and evaluating watershed hydrology responses to LUCC in terms of surface runoff (SURQ), ET, lateral flow (LATQ), percolation (PERC), groundwater flow (GWQ), water yield and soil water (SW), (2) to conduct a basin scale assessment of LUCCs and (3) to determine the allocation of water uses as green and blue water for assessing water potential under different LUCC scenarios.…”