Determining Major Orchard (Pistachio, Olive, Vineyard) Areas in Gaziantep Province using Remote Sensing Techniques

Land use and land cover characteristics of an area supply important information for decision-makers in many disciplines. One of these areas is agriculture that obtains the benefits of these kinds of spatial information in order to plan future production effectively and efficiently. On the other hand, collecting, compiling, managing, analyzing, and displaying the field data are cumbersome duties without spatial understanding. In this study, remote sensing was employed to evaluate spatial data of Gaziantep which is one of the most important provinces of Turkey considering the agricultural activities and its contribution to national economy. Pistachio, grape, olive, maize and cotton constitute the main production areas in Gaziantep. Consequently, land use map that shows spatial distribution and amount of area in different activities is very important for agricultural planners, importers, and exporters in this province. Depending on the request and funding of the Governorship of Gaziantep Province, this project was developed and applied by the Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing Department (GISRSD) of Central Research Institute for Field Crops (CRIFC) between the years 2000 and 2001. Land use maps for main agricultural activities were produced by using coordinated field data and LANDSAT-7 ETM images. The satellite images belong to two different periods have been evaluated with the ground truth data collected by Global Positioning System (GPS). Field data were collected for three main groups which are (1) agriculture (field and orchard), (2) forest-pasture, and (3) non-agricultural. The area statistics obtained from the image classification have been given on county base in this paper.