ABSTRACT
Land-use maps are fundamental to Islamic Area Studies. In developed western countries, land-use maps are available in the form of paper maps as well as digital maps, but in many Islamic areas, even paper maps are unavailable. In such a case, as mentioned in Chapter 1, we can estimate land use using remotely sensed data. Actually, Chapter 4 demonstrates a method of how to estimate preliminary land use (cover) using coarse (low resolution) remotely sensed data, NDVI of NOAA-AVHRR (also see Takeishi 1995). However, land-use maps estimated by such coarse data are insufficient for local area studies. In this Chapter, we demonstrate a typical method for estimating land use using the Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data, which have a higher spatial resolution.
