Green space estimation using IKONOS imageries

The necessity of successful and practical planning in urban forestry and green space of city, in addition to costs and financial sources, is knowing the present situation and potential of considered area from its kind of requirement and ability in growing plants. In this study, IKONOS images and aerial photos were used to get information about the situation of city green space and calculate average of green space per person in the North West of Tehran, third region and some part of second region of municipality, for 538 hectare. Therefore, satellite images were interpreted by automatic digital analysis with maximum likelihood algorithm after necessary preprocessing. Meanwhile, the aerial photos after digitizing and geometric correction were used as ground-truth in classification. For this purpose a dot grid with 4371 points, located in 100 square meter cluster, overlaid on the aerial photos. Then it was determined that each dot belonged to which class. The distances of clusters from each other were 100× 100m and the distance of the dots in each cluster was 5×5m. The results were compared with the results of automatic classification of satellite images, and the error matrix was made. Overall accuracy of classification was 97%. The area was divided in 45 zones according to the boundaries the statistic center of Iran and the average of green space was calculated regarding to the number of population and space of green area in each zone. Then the bare lands were detected and measured as a maximum increasable potential to green space. The results represented that the average of green space per person is 14 square meters in the study area that it's about 20% of whole of it, and the range of it, is between 3/9-28/9 square meters per person that varies in different zones. Finally, the bare lands were ranked in allocating to green area via overlaying the maps of empty places and average of green space.