Article

In the last two decades, the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) increased rapidly due to the great interest of many institutions in Turkey. Parallel to this increase, hardware, software and trained people structures started to develop. This progress enabled the preparation of some countrywide digital databases to be used in spatial analysis and modeling processes. Flora and vegetation studies took the benefit of these improvements, and some applications showed the emerging utility of these tools. In this presentation, we summarized two latest innovations of us that can be used for plant bio-diversity and community composition mapping. In the former, we explained how plant bio-diversity of Nallihan forest ecosystem was modeled and mapped in GIS by utilizing diversity (Shannon Wiener, Simpson, Number of Species) indices, environmental (soil, topography, geology and climate) variables, and remotely sensed data (LANDSAT-ETM+). In the latter, we summarized the ways of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) usage to develop plant community composition maps of Tersakan Valley in Amasya by using both GIS and RS.