Distributional Analysis of Green Tracts and Vegetation-covered Areas

The green tract of land is one of the significant factors for urban planning and urban management to improve and conserve the urban environment. Planning the green tracts is often carried out as a part of land use strategy based on relation to neighborhood, their scale, functions, and locational condition. On the other hand, a vegetation-covered area is a considerable focus of investigation for urban environment. For making the vegetation cover map, it is required to estimate vegetation cover ratio widely. Many previous studies have discussed methods to calculate vegetation cover ratio applying satellite remotely sensed data. In general, the green tracts contain both vegetation-covered areas and vegetation-uncovered areas because there are various kinds of parks/green zones assigned to the green tracts. In addition, the vegetation-covered areas usually include the places allocated to other land use categories excluding the green tract. In case of producing a plan for open spaces, it is necessary to confirm the current status of not only the green tracts of land use but also the vegetation-covered areas. The objective of this study is to develop the comparison method for the difference of distribution between the green tracts and the vegetation-covered areas using a land use map and satellite remotely sensed data. The decision tree method including the two viewpoints from parcel level and local area level was examined as the comparison method. It was shown that the developed method might provide some suggestions for producing a plan for open space.