The island Tenerife is a popular destination for tourists, especially from European countries. From the middle of the 1970s, the mass tourism increased from about 1.3 million to 6 million tourists nowadays (2008).¹ This development lead not only to an increasing expansion of infrastructure but also to a spatial concentration of settlements.² Moreover, the Canary Islands and especially Tenerife are a hotspot of climate change with possible reorientation of atmospheric circulation. The presented research project follows the question how sensitive ecosystems (e.g. laurel forest or pinewood) on Tenerife will be affected by, on the one hand, global impacts of climate change and on the other hand by local socioeconomic effects in future. For this purpose existing time series of land cover and land use change, derived from medium spatial scaled remotely sensed data, will be upgraded with regard to the spatial and temporal resolution. Therefore an object-based classification of high spatial scaled satellite scenes has to be done followed by a change detection analysis. Taking into account the different local and global driving forces for these changes the spatial future development of the most important land use processes like e.g. increase of agricultural land (monocultures) and fallow land will then be simulated and visualised. Based on these results the impacts for different sensitive ecosystems can finally be analysed and valuated.

Date Published: 25 October 2010
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7831, Earth Resources and Environmental Remote Sensing/GIS Applications, 783111 (25 October 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.865107

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7831:
Earth Resources and Environmental Remote Sensing/GIS Applications
Ulrich Michel; Daniel L. Civco, Editor(s)