Assessing the impact of the 2023 Kahramanmaraş and Hatay earthquakes on cadastre and property data using GPS and GIS

Abstract

Natural disasters such as earthquakes, storms, floods, landslides, and tsunamis cause significant losses in land and buildings, which are an integral part of human life. This causes inconsistency between the actual situation in the land and official records and brings legal problems with it. In other words, natural disasters negatively affect human life and cause problems in the country’s cadastral system and land ownership and usage. Therefore, after natural disasters, rapid and fair redefinition of cadastral works and land boundaries in the affected areas is an important need of the society and is the basis of trust in the state. In this study, the effects of the 06 February 2023 (Mw = 7.7, Mw = 7.6) Kahramanmaraş and 20 February 2023 (Mw = 6.4) Hatay earthquakes on the cadastral status of the parcels in and around Kırıkhan district of Hatay province were investigated. By modeling the displacements, the deformation sizes of 4044 parcel corner coordinates and 1333 parcel areas were calculated and analyzed. In terms of the protection of property rights in land management, some suggestions were made by presenting concrete findings of coordinate and areal changes.