Monitoring annual dynamics of urban landscape and vegetation phenology in the conterminous United States using the full archive of Landsat images and Google Earth Engine
Abstract
Changes in urban environments and ecosystems play important roles in terrestrial ecosystems and sustainable urban development. Landsat observations in fine spatial and temporal resolutions, together with new computer technologies, provide the possibility to monitor these changes across large geographic areas and over a long time period. In this study, we developed new algorithms to characterize dynamics of urban extent and phenology (i.e., onsets of green-up and senescence phases) and successfully implemented them on the advanced Google Earth Engine, a start-of-art platform for planetary-scale data analysis, mapping, and modelling. We then mapped annual dynamics of urban landscape and vegetation phenology in the conterminous United States (US) from 1985 to 2018 using all clear-sky pixels in the full archive of Landsat observations. The evaluation indicates that the proposed algorithms are robust and perform well in deriving changes in urban environments. The resulted products of annual dynamics of urban extents and phenology indicators from this study offer new datasets for relevant urban studies such as modeling urban sprawl over large areas and investigating ecosystem responses to urbanization.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.B24A..04Z
- Keywords:
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- 0416 Biogeophysics;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0426 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1632 Land cover change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1640 Remote sensing;
- GLOBAL CHANGE