Abstract

The aim of this study was to analyze the urban land use changes of Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, using very high resolution remote sensing (RS) and geographical information system (GIS) datasets. In this study, land use status in Ulaanbaatar before 1990 are compared with the land use changes that occurred after 1990 and the socio-economic reasons for the changes are described. For the basic preparation of spatial and attribute database, a large scale topographic map from 2000 and historical description of the land use elements are used. To update the land use information from 2000 to 2008, very high resolution panchromatic and multispectral Quickbird images of 2008 as well as TerraSAR image of 2008 are fused. For the fusion, some advanced data fusion techniques are compared in terms of the enhancement of spatial and spectral variations of urban features. To extract land use information from the fused RS images, a visual interpretation is applied. Overall, the study demonstrates that during the market economy Ulaanbaatar city is urbanized very rapidly and there is a need to reconsider its planning and management.

Key words: Urban land use, remote sensing (RS), geographical information system (GIS), Image fusion, change analysis.

Abbreviation

GCP, Ground control points; GIS, geographical information system; RS,remote sensing; IHS, intensity hue-saturation; FFT, fast Fourier transform; LP, low pass; HP,high pass; PCA, principal components analysis; RMS, root mean square.