Abstract
Landcover has been largely influenced by human activities, especially in recent days. The analysis of the change of land use by urbanized development is useful for determining development plan hereafter. This study aimed to the quantitative analysis about the urban sprawl within 12 years from 1985 to 1996, at Chonan, and for extracting the characteristics of change. For this purpose, this study performed land cover classifications using Landsat TM data . A hybrid classification method was used to classify satellite images into seven types of land cover. Road network digitied from 1:25,000 topographic map was rasterized and overlaid on the landcover map. A result of this study showed that area of forest and paddy decreased due to urban sprawl. Especially from 1993 to 1996, the change of land use progressed rapidly because of merging a city and a country in Chonan. The size of patch in forest had been smaller and irregular form. It is a general progress that size of patch in forest had been smaller and irregular form. It is a general progress that the forest have changed the paddy and bare land paddy and bare land have changed low-density urban or high-density urban. This explained how urbanized Chonan was and applied the suggeston of plan in landuse with the result of this study.