A monitoring concept for detection of land cover change along main traffic routes in Switzerland

It is not known if land cover change is accelerating due to traffic close to main roads. We developed a monitoring concept for the detection of land cover change along main traffic routes in Switzerland. Because of the small structured landscape and the necessity to detect rather small changes, data of different spatial and temporal resolution will be used. Landsat data is used in order to get actual information, existing inventories and aerial images for the calibration of the classification algorithms of the satellite images. The land cover classification will be analyzed on a hectare grid and landscape indicators are calculated. The comparison to other areas enables conclusions of traffic dependencies.