No abstract

Increasing population growth and growing ecological problems in urban areas require advanced remote sensing technology for the acquisition of detailed and accurate land-use information for urban management and planning issues. Surface consumption of 120 ha per day (2003) for traffic and settlement areas in Germany is far away from the 30 ha per day of the sustainability-strategy intended for the year 2020 by the Federal Environmental Ministry. With regard to the 50ies, imperviousness and sealing almost doubled. The presented study is embedded in a project in North RhineWestphalia (NRW), the most densely populated federal state in Germany. During the last decades, industrial transformation processes as well as strong economic and socio-structural changes have taken place, making NRW most suitable as an exemplary region to study and visualize dynamic developments in Europe. The examined time period of this work includes intense urban development and expansion in the suburban regions. LANDSAT data of three time slices (1975, 1984 & 2001) build the backbone to detect the changes taken place. Applying a multisensoral approach with improved spatial and even spectral resolution the focus is on the urban development of certain "hot spots" in NRW. CORONA, IKONOS as well as ASTER satellite data is used to allow a further characterization of urban landuse types and changes in more detail over the last four decades. Classical change detection methods as PCA are combined with classification of segmented urban land-use areas when evaluating the type of change.