Effect of raster-vector conversion on remotely sensed data in a watershed

Areal information on the land-use distribution is an essential step in estimating diffuse pollution loads arising from watersheds. Accurate calculation of areal values increases the reliability of the load calculations. Nowadays, classified satellite imagery is main data source for producing areal information on the land-use/cover. In this study, LANDSAT 5TM satellite image dated 2006 was classified in order to obtain areal information on the current land-use activities in a watershed located along the Western Black Sea Coast of Turkey. In this study, various image processing techniques are used for a single data set in a test region, and the probable errors that might occur during the transformation of obtained data to GIS are analyzed. The findings of the study have indicated that the error occurred during the transformation of vector data into GIS was considerably lower when vector data is obtained from classification results.