Sarris, A.; Maniadakis, M.; Lazaridou, O.; Kalogrias, V.; Bariotakis, M.; Pirintsos, St., "Studying Land Use Patterns in Crete Island , Greece , Through a Time Sequence of Landsat Images and Mapping Vegetation Patterns", WSEAS International MultiConference on Int.Conf. on ENVIRONMENT, ECOSYSTEMS and DEVELOPMENT(EED'05) , Venice, Italy (November 2-4), vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 272–279.
The discrete character of the islands of the Mediterranean Sea, in terms of their rough anaglyph and their climatic differentiation creates a number of difficulties in the detection of the changes of land use patterns and vegetation pattern through satellite images. The internal complexity of the terrain and the land surface provide obstacles in the clear discrimination of land uses and habitat types. The spatial coherence of the land uses is very helpful for a more complete description of the spectral properties of the satellite images contributing significantly to the detection of the possible coexistence of classes. Apart of the linear methods, differential topological methods were used to detect the spatial complexity of the land uses, such as the fractal dimensions of the perimeters of the polygons constructed through classification techniques. Object oriented classification was applied for the vegetation classification. The above mentioned techniques were employed for a better understanding of the temporal changes of land use and the production of a vegetation map in the island of Crete.
