[H-TT17] Environmental Remote Sensing

[HTT17-P14] A Volunteer Program to Improve Land Development Management

*Ya-Chen Yang¹, Youg-Sin Cheng¹, Chi-Farn Chen¹ (1.Center for Space and Remote Sensing Research, National Central University, Taiwan)

Keywords:Land-use monitoring, Illegal land use, Volunteer program

The land-use types become more and more complicated because of the growth in economic development and social changes. In Taiwan, for effectively preventing illegal or improper land development, a land-use monitoring project is proposed and implemented by the government. The project uses multi-temporal satellite images and remote sensing technology to detect land-use changes regularly. After that, the integrated GIS maps and the expert knowledge is employed to select the illegal change areas. Since the project is successfully implemented, the public is inspired and interested in participating the project in order to report the illegal land development. Therefore, the project creates a volunteer program to encourage people to take part in the land-use monitoring project. The program establishes a web-based system called as “Volunteer Land Use Monitoring and Notification System” which is specially designed for real-time data sharing between the land-use monitoring project and the volunteers. Generally, the volunteer can upload the preliminary information of the illegal land use to the system that includes discovery time/date, location, description of the field situation and field photographs. After acquiring the necessary information from the volunteer, the project team will analyze multi-temporal satellite images and submit the suspicious illegal land-use information to the local authority to perform the field investigation and examine the legality of the use of the land. The result obtained from the field investigator will be updated to the system and pass the information on to the volunteer by E-mail. In addition, the project team normally organizes a training workshop every year for the volunteers that focus on the fundamental concepts of the remote sensing technology, the background introduction of the project and the instruction manual of the web-based volunteer system. At this moment, there are more than 500 people have joined the volunteer program and reports a considerable amount of the illegal development of land use. In conclusion, the land-use monitoring project is originally designed to use multi-temporal satellite images to monitor the illegal land use. The join of the volunteer program enables the land monitoring project to detect more effectively the illegal land development from sky to ground.