Monitoring the land use/cover changes and habitat quality using Landsat dataset and landscape metrics under the immigration effect in subalpine eastern Turkey

Monitoring the land use/cover change (LUCC) is a vital part of the ecological planning in fast-changing regions. Fast industrial developments, local social dynamics like internal security problems and hard life conditions in rural places can impact LUCC directly. The purpose of this paper was to detect LUCC and its effects on landscape ecology using landscape metrics (LMs) in the Tatvan region of Turkey located in eastern Anatolia. Landscape of the Tatvan region has been transformed due to two main reasons: fast-developing industries in Turkey and security problems in the eastern Anatolian regions since 1985. Landsat 5 TM 1989 and Landsat 8 OLI 2013 satellite images were used to detect LUCC for 24 years. Additionally, landscape changes were evaluated based on LMs to observe the habitat quality change. As a result of the study, settlement areas were increased almost 100 % in 24 years because of immigration from rural to urban areas. At the same time, grasslands were transformed into agricultural lands, settlement and forestlands. Therefore, agricultural activities increased by 45 %. Animal production was the main income in the 1980s, but while the rural population decreased, agricultural activities and industrial income increased around the cities thus animal production lost importance after 2010. From the results of the edge density, mean core area, total core area, mean patch area, Shannon's diversity index and shape index values, it was observed that overall habitat quality decreased in 24 years.