Monitoring the urban expansion of Athens using remote sensing and GIS techniques in the last 35 years

Konstantinos Nikolakopoulos; Kosmas Pavlopoulos; Christos Chalkias; Dora Manou

doi:10.1117/12.626807

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31 October 2005 Monitoring the urban expansion of Athens using remote sensing and GIS techniques in the last 35 years

Konstantinos Nikolakopoulos, Kosmas Pavlopoulos, Christos Chalkias, Dora Manou

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Proceedings Volume 5983, Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring, GIS Applications, and Geology V; 598309 (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.626807
Event: SPIE Remote Sensing, 2005, Bruges, Belgium

Abstract

During the last thirty-five years the capital of Greece has suffered from an enormous internal immigration. Its population has overpassed the five millions and today almost the half population of Greece is squeezed in Athens metropolitan area. Because of the significant increase of population, the urban expansion in the basin of Athens was also excessive and in some cases catastrophic. Buildings have covered all the free places, new roads have been constructed, the drainage networks have been covered or disappeared and a lot of changes have been occurred to the landforms. The construction of the new airport (Elefterios Venizelos) at the beginning of this decade created a new commercial and urban pole at the eastern part of Athens and the constructive activity has been moved to new areas around the airport. Our aim was to detect and map all the changes that occurred in the urban area, estimate the urban expansion rate and the human interferences in the natural landscape, using GIS and remote sensing techniques. We have used satellite images from three different periods (1973, 1992, 2002) and topographic maps of 1:25.000 scale. The spatial resolution of all the satellite images ranges from 5 to 10 meters and is it acceptable for the monitoring and mapping of the urban growth. Supervised classification and on screen digitizing methods have been used in order to map the changes. Finally the qualitative and quantitative results of this study are presented in this paper.

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Konstantinos Nikolakopoulos, Kosmas Pavlopoulos, Christos Chalkias, and Dora Manou "Monitoring the urban expansion of Athens using remote sensing and GIS techniques in the last 35 years", Proc. SPIE 5983, Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring, GIS Applications, and Geology V, 598309 (31 October 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.626807

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