Deriving current land-use information for metropolitan transportation planning through integration of remotely sensed data and GIS

Transportation planners and metropolitan planning organizations require up- to-date land-use information to allocate transportation resources and to fo recast the location and type of growth within metropolitan areas and associ ated increases in transportation volumes. For rapidly changing areas, extan t geographic databases may not contain current land-use information. Other layers in the GIS database have potential for aiding image-based procedures far updating land-use layers. Results from the fir st of two case studies suggest that land-use change detection using high spatial resolution imager y is useful for detecting individual change features, but that automatic de lineation of these features yields imprecise boundaries, such that interact ive delineation is likely to be required. Results from the second case stud y indicate that many GIS data layers maintained by metropolitan planning or ganizations provide useful information for determining current land use whe n combined with interactive identification of land-use category from high r esolution image data.