Determining land use changes caused and will be caused by completed, under-construction and planned large dams on Coruh River

The most severe negativity of large dams, in general, is pointed as inundation of vast lands with various usages (e.g. forest, agriculture and establishment) because this, in turn, causes very serious and generally adverse ecological, economic, social and cultural changes on river watersheds. That is why it is crucial to shortly, correctly and with low cost estimate land use changes caused by large dams in respect to both knowing such changes in advance and planning of watersheds later on. A similar process is under way as several large dams planned to be constructed on the Coruh River within the State Water Affairs? Coruh Dams Project. In this study, the aim was to determine land use changes caused by seven large dams at different stages (e.g. completed, under-construction or planned) on the Middle and Lower Coruh Watershed within the city of Artvin. In order to find out usage types and estimate areal sizes of lands inundated by these dams, ?forestry stand maps? and ?CORINE Land Cover (CLC-2006)? along with data gathered from the processes of ?compulsory purchases? were used. Estimates showed that when all the large dams are completed, according to two maps used in this research, approximately 8137 ha area with various usage types will be inundated and consequently changed. It was clearly seen that out of this total area the biggest ratio was forested lands (62% in the forest stand maps; 52% in the CLC-2006) while the smallest ratio belonged to establishments (0.77% in the forest stand maps; 1.77% in the CLC-2006). In addition, when comparing the estimates from the forest stand maps and the CLC-2006 with the estimates calculated from the processes of compulsory purchases for Borcka, Deriner and Artvin Dams, it was determined that both maps did not really give results close to the ones gathered from the data of the compulsory purchases.