Detecting land cover changes through remote sensing and GIS techniques

This note concerns the updating of the land cover map of the Arno River basin (9.000 km2) developed in the frame of a research project aimed at landslide risk assessment. The land cover map has been produced through the analysis of panchromatic/multispectral Landsat ETM+ images and TERRA-ASTER data; those data were integrated and compared with B/W and color ortho-photos. To improve photointerpretation and to obtain a higher resolution of the multispectral data, some image fusion techniques have been applied to Landsat data, such as Hue Saturation Value (HSV), Color Normalized (CN) and Principal Component Substitution (PCS). The land cover data base of the CORINE Land cover Project have been updated and improved to a scale 1:50.000.