Changes in soil sealing in Guadalajara (Spain): Cartography with LANDSAT images

The great urban and industrial development of the towns surrounding Madrid has caused an irreversible and rapid soil loss. In this paper, soil sealed evolution in Guadalajara province during the past 15 years, mainly in the capital, industrial district and small municipalities near Madrid, has been studied. This province has experimented a sharp reduction of the most fertile soils, located on the Henares valley, due to the action of new models of local and regional development.The main goal of this paper is the mapping of the covered soils in a pilot area of Spain. Supervised classification of Landsat images from 1989 to 2002 has been carried out. Geo-referred image analysis allows us to detect precisely the amount of covered soils and where this phenomenon has taken place.