"Report on the status of territory-remote sensing and GIS techniques for urban changes detection at regional level in Piemonte (Italy)"

This paper shows the first working steps and results in the framework of the project. "Report on the state of territory" actually in progress and carried out by the Planning Bureau of Regione Piemonte and by the Territorial and Cartographic Services Office of CSI-Piemonte. The project is aimed to experiment remote sensing and GIS techniques for the observation of urban changes at regional scale and their applications in the context of the activities of the Planning Bureau of Regione Piemonte. First results of the project is the definition of a set of indicators to quantify urban changes in terms of quantity, dispersion and impact of soil consumption in order to define evolutive scenarios occurred on the regional territory and to provide a data base "year 0" easily updated. Different kind of data. (satellite images, thematic data) are analysed with a holistic and multitemporal approach for defining a methodology to improve the use of remote sensing data for urban changes detection. Data updating will become a periodical service repeatable and comparable in time and space according to the different phenomena investigated. Data produced will constitute a common base for specific purposes and will be distributed to different users both on paper version and web version