Coastal Zone Management/Coastal Information System

An important aspect of natural and environmental resources management is the availability of georeferenced data and information that describes these resources. Remote sensing, GIS, meteorological and other environmental observations assist in acquiring and processing such data for addressing a variety of key issues related to environment and natural resources management, coastal zone monitoring (CZM), food production and food security, desertification, biological diversity, energy and climate change impact. Georeferenced data from other sources, for example, socioeconomic data, can also be combined with such environmental data for more in-depth analyses. CZM involves the planning and organization of development processes, controlling the activities and transferring the coastal areas to the succeeding generations in healthy conditions. In this paper, an important component of the CZM, a computer-based Coastal Information System (CIS) at a study area, declared as Specially Protected Area by the Turkish Government, was established and the importance and effectiveness of the ground truth and spaceborne sensor data for environmental and resource management were explained.