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Green corridors are inevitable part of land cover and land use planning activities as they affect climate, hydrology and ecology of the urbanized regions. Detection and monitoring of green corridors and their relative functions are very important in terms of landscape management. They also carry information on changing speed from “green to grey” and fragmentation level of the urbanized regions. Analyzing the fragmentation level of the landscape formation reflects the management strategy and overall success of decision makers. This paper aims to assessment landscape fragmentation in relation to green corridor planning for the first time on coastal section of Trabzon and Rize city centers from South Eastern part of the Black Sea. The study area is densely populated coastal region with linear-littoral formation. Remote Sensing (RS), Geographical Information System (GIS) and in-situ techniques were used to detect pattern and role of green corridors in the study area. Green coverage was extracted by using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification algorithm. SVM classifier performed better on digital aerial images when compared to multispectral satellite data. After the classification, five land use/cover (LULC) classes were obtained: urban green areas, asphalt ways, water, other urban objects and shades with 94.64 and 96.53 overall accuracies for Trabzon and Rize cities, respectively. Shape related landscape metrics were computed to show the level of fragmented green covers in study area. Larger patches were observed in Rize with higher Largest Patch Index (LPI) values. Computed Area Weighted Mean Shape Index (AWMSI) and Area Weighted Mean Patch Fractal Dimension (AWMPFD) values indicated higher urbanization rates in Trabzon city. Green corridor networks were proposed for each city by considering the fragmentation level and landscape design rules. Finally, some implications were done towards creating ecologic cities in the context of sustainable landscape and ecological conservation.
