Abstract
The importance of green plants in cities, especially that of the urban forest is recognized in recent years to provide the peaceful and calm city life. In the urban areas, the forests are not only playing the environment conservation function such as wind arresting, dust prevention and sound isolation, and disaster provention function such as the prevention of landslide disaster, but also playing psychological functions to provide the scenic spots and place of comfort to the citizens. However, the urban forest is in declining trend along with the expansion of urban area. From these point of views, it will be quite important to grasp the present state and characteristics of forest in the cities for the urban planning and open space planning in the future.
In this study, we tried to grasp the present state and characteristics of the urban forests by the overlay processing of raster data and vector data, taking the forests in Kokubunji-City as an example. We extracted the forest areas from aerial color photograph, overlaid there on the forest areas obtained from each kind of geographical imformation, and eliminated the errors by automatic classification. Next, these raster data were converted into vector data; and we grasped the distribution characteristics of forest by overlaying the vector data with the geographical information such as topographic conditions and land use classifications.
We obtained the following results from this study.
(1) By applying the present study method, it has become possible to obtain forest information with attributes which are necessary for the open space planning from the "green cover" extracted from the remote sensing data.
(2) We were able to grasp the characteristics and functions of the forests in urban area by overlaying the forest areas thus obtained and natural and social factors which characterize these forests.
