Evaluation Of Urban Land Cover And Land Use - Large Scale Quantification And Characterization From Satellite-Based Remote Sensing

Increasing urban development demand leads to significant changes on the land surface, by converting natural landscape to anthropogenic impervious surfaces. Consequently, urbanization alters surface energy fluxes, evapotranspiration, and regional climate conditions. To understand the effects of urbanization on surface physical features and terrestrial ecosystems, accurate information about the spatial extent and temporal change of urban land cover is needed. Impervious surface, which is one of the primary products of the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2001, has been widely recognized as an important way to describe urbanization quantitatively. This continuous field product is often used to characterize urban land use features for different environmental models, and supply other research on human induced ecosystem changes. This study introduces the latest method for updating NLCD 2001 impervious surface to circa 2006 using satellite remotely sensed data. This method was prototyped for national implementation using five regional study areas. The importance of using medium resolution urban data to quantify heterogeneity features in urban areas is demonstrated. Fig.1 demonstrates 2001 and 2006 Landsat images, 2001 and 2006 impervious surfaces for the Seattle area. Implementation of updated urban land use information to evaluate regional ecosystem changes, including surface temperature and fractional vegetation, will be introduced. Fig.1 2006 impervious surface in the Seattle area (left), 2001 and 2006 Landsat images (upper right), 2001 impervious surface, and 2006 new impervious surface in the area maked by the square on the left.