ABSTRACT
Land use can be defined as the ‘activity or socio-economic function for which land is used’1, p.2. Barnsley et al.2 note that the terms ‘land cover’ and ‘land use’ are often used interchangeably within a single classification scheme and provide the distinct definitions of land cover referring to the ‘physical materials on the surface of a given parcel of land’ and land use being the ‘human activity that takes place upon it’. Although the increased availability of high-resolution remotely-sensed imagery offers the potential for the regular update of land cover data, land use information cannot be derived solely from identification of land surface characteristics. This is because land use is defined in terms of function rather than physical form3, and consequently has a high dependency on in situ manual survey.
