Land Cover Analysis for Evapotranspiration Assessment in Catania Metropolitan Region

Today, the contraction of green zones is a key issue for land use planning with relation to climate change effects on urban areas. Furthermore, the loss of evapotranspiring surfaces and vegetated soils is one of the main consequences of urban sprawl processes. We present the case of Catania metropolitan area, the 2nd most populated urban region in Sicily. In particular, three municipalities are analysed, as they present the most relevant urban sprawl processes. Inside this complex “urban jam”, there are still large non-urbanised spaces. These patches (cultivated and abandoned agriculture land and lava fields from Mt. Etna), deeply fragmented, are often left for future development. These areas are particularly important in the examined context, considering the lack of green spaces for ecological functions and leisure. The paper focuses on land cover analysis based on land use maps and oriented to assess evapotranspiration degree of the different land uses. Land use categories have been geographically sampled and eight land cover types have been extracted with GIS by photo interpretation of high resolution orthophotos. Other sets of geodatabases have been used, including vectorial/raster cartographies and field surveys. Results from this evapotranspiration assessment can be useful for addressing land use planning of non urbanised areas within a sprawled metropolitan area, identifying new forms of agriculture, leisure and environment protection.