A New Research Tool For Environmental Studies LUT map : Land Use and Topography
Present day advancements of the digital mapping and GIS are well performed in developed world but give less benefits tot eh third world due to economical and technological reasons. A new concept of Appropriate Technology (AT) has been introduced to regional development programs in developing countries although GIS tools are still an essential part of regional development through the use of AT (Yapa 1991, p.40).
Most of the developing countries are still using 1 inch to 1 mile conventional Topographic map in their planning requirements and these maps have a greater accuracy in location but less information on land use types. On the other hand many of these countries are available with satellite data. In this research paper, some of the above discussed technological developments were utilized together with few conventional data sources and methods in order to construct a new thematic map. The procedure of the research uses Landsat MSS data of Southern Sri Lanka with 1:63,360 topographic maps of the area. The resulted map will show land use and topographic features simultaneously by colors and the map can be called as “LUT Map” since it is based on Land Use and Topographic data.
2.Study area and the Data base
The area which was selected for the study lies between two major rivers in southern Sri Lanka and contains approximately 1460 km
2 land area (See fig. 1). Eastern part of the area is relatively dry and the mean annual temperature is ranges from 22.5 – 27.5 C. Rainfall has greater differences within the area and the mean annual rainfall from 1000mm to 4000mm. Wet western half has much human activities including homestead gardens, spice and other plantation activities. Thick forest areas are mainly located in north western mountains and these are few isolated forest patches. Since the eastern part is relatively dry, these are number of major irrigation projects around that area. This physical and human structure was the key reason for selecting this particular area for the study.
Fig.1. Location and general information of the study area.
