Comparing Land Cover Maps Obtained From Remote Sensing for Deriving Urban Indicators

From a land planning perspective, it is worthwhile to investigate different levels of information abstraction regarding scale, class detail or minimum mapping unit, that allow characterizing the most common situations land planners have to deal with. The identification of the processes and the characteristics that must be monitored will directly influence the effort and the time spent for land mapping and, consequently, the mapping cost. Accordingly, it is possible to orient the land mapping process towards different applications that require specific products. This study addresses the extraction of thematic information from remote sensing data for producing urban in-dicators at local scale in urban environments. Two maps obtained from satellite imagery are compared. The maps differ in methodology, legend and minimum mapping unit. Through the analysis of the different map specifications, it can be concluded that land use classifications can be problematic for estimating urban envi-ronmental indicators. For those applications, land cover maps are more suitable.