**6. Determination of landscape structure, analysis, evaluation, and use of GIS as a tool in planning**

GIS is used to characterize the landscape on the basis of landscape ecology and has widely been used for typing rural landscape habitats, biotopes, ecosystems, land use, ecological regions, and so on. Structural formation detection, analysis, evaluation, planning, and monitoring at locations have given GIS an increasing importance for the past several years. This use of GIS is important especially for research in which an explanation of spatial rela‐ tionships is needed in the form of thematic maps. The spatial relationships of the past have been used to develop scenarios and models for the future, and these relationships and models of current or future public squares have proven the GIS system's ability to interpret future changes [19, 41–45].

Since the late 1980s, structural diversity has been determined using GIS, and since the early 1990s, spatial and temporal landscapes have been used in GIS analysis. During this period, the landscape metrics for detecting and analyzing landscape structures were formed. These metrics were developed through naturally occurring and anthropogenic changes in the landscape structure, habitat quality, biodiversity, and ecosystem assessment, which expressed the effect of the nutrient loop. Subsequently, GIS-based and integrated forms of software have been developed [19, 40–46].
