Analysis of Urbanization of Split

Sa？etak This research aims to analyse urbanization of Split. The research was conducted on the data of five Landsat mission satellite images, of Split area, over a period of thirty years. Unsupervised classification by the K-means method was conducted on the images. Accordingly, the satellite images were classified into four classes: vegetation, water, bare soil and built-up. The interpretation and analysis of the land cover change followed. Open source software’s SAGA-GIS and QGIS were used for satellite image processing, classification and subsequent analysis. Socio-economic developments have been researched in parallel and attached to the statistical data and presented in graphs. Chronologically, a constant reduction trend of vegetation and bare soil areas, as well as the increase in built-up areas were noticed. The most significant land cover changes were observed between the two sets of satellite images that include the first and last year of the research, 1987 and 2016. In 1987, the land cover of the city of Split included 55.44% of vegetation cover, 24.71% of bare soil and 18.62% of the built-up. In 2016, the land cover of the city of Split represented 48.44% of the vegetation cover, 22.35% of bare soil and 28.16% of the built-up. It is clear, that the differences of land cover change are enormous, especially in built-up, which amounts 9.55% of the area of Split and total of 6.83 km2. In the thirty-year period, the built-up area in Split was increased by 51.28%