Monitoring Soil Degradation Processes for Ecological Compensation in the Izmir Institute of Technology Campus (Turkey)

Abstract

Monitoring changing environmental conditions for short-term periods is a key aspect of adaptive urban planning. Unfortunately, the official environmental datasets are often produced at too large time intervals, and sometimes the speed of urban transformation requires real-time monitoring data. In this work we employed ESRI ArcGIS (ver. 10.8.1) to process two normalized difference vegetation indices for the campus area of the Izmir Institute of Technology (Turkey). The area of this campus constitutes an optimal site for testing whether alterations to the soil due to excavation and new construction can be monitored in small areas of land. We downloaded two different Sentinel acquisitions from the Copernicus ONDA DIAS platform: one taken on 28 March 2021 and the second taken on 13 March 2022. We processed the images while elaborating the normalized difference vegetation index for both years and compared them. Results demonstrate that all major and minor soil degradations on the campus during the intervening year were detected and empirically quantified in terms of NDVI reduction (abrupt changes). These findings confirm that detailed seasonal environmental monitoring of every part of the world is now possible using semi-automatic procedures to process original Sentinel data and recommend site-specific ecological compensation measures.