Urban land use change study in Mongolia using spatial techniques

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the urban land use changes of the central part of Ulaanbaatar city, Mongolia using advanced spatial methods. For the study, the changes that occurred before 1990 are compared with the changes that occurred after 1990 and the socio-economic reasons for the changes are described. For the development of the primary digital database, a large scale topographic map and historical description of the land use elements are used. To update the database and extract the reliable urban land use information, very high resolution panchromatic and multispectral Quickbird images of 2012 are fused. To generate land use information from the fused images, a visual interpretation is applied. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that during the market economy the central part of the capital city urbanised very rapidly and became very dense.