: Land use/cover change (LUCC) is one of the causes of global climate and environmental change. Understanding rapid LUCC in urbanized areas is vital for natural resources management for sustainable development. This study primarily considered Vientiane, the capital of Laos, which experienced rapid LUCC due to both natural and anthropogenic factors. The study used geographical information system (GIS) combined with ERDAS and TerrSet technologies to objectively process the ground surveyed and remotely obtained data in order to investigate the historical LUCC as well as predict future LUCC in the study area during the periods of 1995–2018 and 2030–2050, respectively. A comprehensive list of assessment factors comprised of both natural and anthropogenic factors was used for analysis using the cellular automata–Markov (CA–Markov) model. The results show a historical loss of intact forest of 24.36% and of bare land of 1.01%. There were also tremendous increases in degraded forest (11.36%), agricultural land (8.91%), built-up areas (4.49%) and water bodies (1.16%). Finally, the LUCC prediction results indicate the conversion of land use from one type to another, particularly from natural to anthropogenic use, in the near future. These changes demonstrate that the losses associated with ecosystem services will destructively impact human wellbeing in the city and other areas of the country. The study results provide the basic scientific knowledge for LUCC planners, urban designers and natural resources managers. They serve as a decision-making support tool for the establishment of sustainable land resource utilization policies in Vientiane and other cities of similar conditions.

The global and regional land use/cover changes (LUCCs) are experiencing widespread changes, particularly in Baghdad City, the oldest city of Iraq, where it lacks ecological restoration and environmental management actions at present. To date, multiple land uses are experiencing urban construction-related land expansion, population increase, and socioeconomic development. Comprehensive evaluation and understanding of the effect of urban sprawl and its rapid LUCC are of great importance to managing land surface resources for sustainable development. The present research applied remote sensing data, such as Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper and Landsat-8 Operation Land Imager, on selected images between July and August from 1985 to 2020 with the use of multiple types of software to explore, classify, and analyze the historical and future LUCCs in Baghdad City. Three historical LUCC maps from 1985, 2000, and 2020 were created and analyzed. The result shows that urban construction land expands quickly, and agricultural land and natural vegetation have had a large loss of coverage during the last 35 years. The change analysis derived from previous land use was used as a change direction for future simulation, where natural and anthropogenic factors were selected as the drivers’ variables in the process of multilayer perceptron neural network Markov chain model. The future land use/cover change (FLUCC) modeling results from 2030 to 2050 show that agriculture is the only land use type with a massive decreasing trend from 1985 to 2050 compared with other categories. The entire change in urban sprawl derived from historical and FLUCC in each period shows that urban construction land increases the fastest between 2020 and 2030. The rapid urbanization along with unplanned urban growth and rising population migration from rural to urban is the main driver of all transformation in land use. These findings facilitate sustainable ecological development in Baghdad City and theoretically support environmental decision making.

Erlong Lake is considered one of the largest lakes in midwest Jilin, China, and one of the drinking water resources in neighboring cities. The present study aims to explore the usage of Landsat TM5, ETM7, and OLI8 images to assess water quality (V-phenol, dissolved oxygen (DO), NH4-N, NO3-N) in Erlong Lake, Jilin province, northeast China. Thirteen multispectral images were used in this study for May, July, August, and September in 2000, 2001, 2002, and October 2020. Radiometric and atmospheric corrections were applied to all images. All in situ water quality parameters were strongly correlated to each other, except DO. The in situ measurements (V-phenol, dissolved oxygen, NH4-N, NO3-N) were statistically correlated with various spectral band combinations (blue, green, red, and NIR) derived from Landsat imagery. Regression analysis reported that there are strong relationships between the estimated and retrieved water quality from the Landsat images. Moreover, in calibrations, the highest value of the coefficient of determination (R2) was ≥0.85 with (RMSE) = 0.038; the lowest value of R2 was >0.30 with RMSE= 0.752. All generated models were validated in different statistical indices; R2 was up to 0.95 for most cases, with RMSE ranging from 1.390 to 0.050. Finally, the empirical algorithms were successfully assessed (V-phenol, dissolved oxygen, NH4-N, NO3-N) in Erlong Lake, using Landsat images with very good accuracy. Both in situ and model retrieved results showed the same trends with non-significant differences. September of 2000, 2001, and 2002 and October of 2020 were selected to assess the spatial distributions of V-phenol, DO, NH4-N, and NO3-N in the lake. V-phenol, NH4-N, and NO3-N were reported low in shallow water but high in deep water, while DO was high in shallow water but low in deep water of the lake. Domestic sewage, agricultural, and urban industrial pollution are the most common sources of pollution in the Erlong Lake.

Understanding future landscape risk pattern change (FLRPC) scenarios will help people manage and utilize natural resources. In this study, we have selected a variety of landscape and anthropogenic factors as risk parameters for FLRPC assessment. Land use/cover change (LUCC) and land surface temperature (LST) are regarded as significant factors that have resulted in large-scale environmental changes. Result analysis of the previous LUCC from 1985 to 2020 showed that construction land and water body (WB) increased by 669.09 and 183.16 km2, respectively. The study continues to predict future LUCC from 2030 to 2050, in which the result has shown that a large land use conversion occurred during the future prediction period. In addition, the LST forecasting analysis illustrated that the previous LST maximum and minimum are 38 °C and 15 °C, which will be increased to 40.83 °C and 26.25 °C in the future, respectively. Finally, the study used the weighted overlay method for the FLRPC analysis, which applies analytic hierarchy process techniques for risk evaluation. The FLRPC result demonstrated that Baghdad City is in the low-risk and medium-risk to high-risk categories from 2020 to 2050, while AL and BL are in the very-high-risk categories. Meanwhile, WB and NG have always been safe, falling into the very-low-risk and low-risk categories from 2020 to 2050. Therefore, this study has successfully assessed the Baghdad metropolitan area and made recommendations for future urban development for a more safe, resilient, and sustainable development.