Assessing Riyadh’s Urban Change Utilizing High-Resolution Imagery

Abstract

The implications of change on local processes have attracted significant research interest in recent times. In urban settings, green spaces and forests have attracted much attention. Here, we present an assessment of change within the predominantly desert Middle Eastern city of Riyadh, an understudied setting. We utilized high-resolution SPOT 5 data and two classification techniques-maximum likelihood classification and object-oriented classification-to study the changes in Riyadh between 2004 and 2014. Imagery classification was completed with training data obtained from the SPOT 5 dataset, and an accuracy assessment was completed through a combination of field surveys and an application developed in ESRI Survey 123 tool. The Survey 123 tool allowed residents of Riyadh to present their views on land cover for the 2004 and 2014 imagery. Our analysis showed that soil or 'desert' areas were converted to roads and buildings to accommodate for Riyadh's rapidly growing population. The object-oriented classifier provided higher overall accuracy than the maximum likelihood classifier (74.71% and 73.79% vs. 92.36% and 90.77% for 2004 and 2014). Our work provides insights into the changes within a desert environment and establishes a foundation for understanding change in this understudied setting. landscape [24]. Due to the physical and morphological conditions, economic state, population growth, political situation, policies, and social behaviors that vary from one region to another, predicting patterns of urban growth is complicated [25]. Nevertheless, significant progress has been made in understanding urban processes, including the importance of performing spatiotemporal analyses of urban growth to understand the characteristics and consequences of growth and how this is manifested from one location to another [8,21,[25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. One of the critical factors that have emerged from recent studies in urban processes and change is that in trying to understanding future growth within urban centers, it is critical to first understand and document the physical conditions within a city. Despite the significant progress made in understanding urban growth, our knowledge of urban change has not been uniform across all settings, a fact especially manifested in the states of the Middle East and North Africa.The urban centers of the Middle East and North Africa are undergoing rapid transformation, including significant growth in the youth population, and an urbanization trend that will result in large numbers of people settling in major cities [30]. Still, the analysis of the changes occurring within Middle Eastern cities remains incomplete. This is particularly critical as the territory of the Middle East and North Africa is 11.2 million km 2 -larger than the United States (9.8 million km 2 ), China (9.5 million km 2 ), and the European Union (4.3 million km 2 ). To date, only a few studies have focused on urban processes and change within the Middle East. Among the studies completed in the region was the work of ...

Local Climate Zones and Thermal Characteristics in Riyadh City, Saudi Arabia

“…During the last few decades, the city has experienced significant population growth from 80,000 in 1952 to 6,700,000 in 2015 [21,25]. Several studies have examined changes in land cover/use (LCLU) in Riyadh City (e.g., [26][27][28][29]) and a few have looked at future expansion (e.g., [25,30]). According to these studies, the urban area has substantially increased over the last few decades, with a higher likelihood of significant future expansions.…”

Recognition and Prediction of Land Dynamics and Its Associated Impacts in Al-Qurayyat City and along Al-Shamal Train Pathway in Saudi Arabia

“…Refs. [3,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] studied the urban growth in Ar-Riyadh City in the central region of Saudi Arabia. In contrast, refs.…”

“…Meanwhile, ref. [16] used SPOT-5 satellite datasets acquired in 2004 and 2014 to assess the land cover changes in Ar-Riyadh City. The results show an increase in urban area by 15.2% and a decline of 14.1% in barren land area between 2004 and 2014.…”

Semantic Segmentation and Edge Detection—Approach to Road Detection in Very High Resolution Satellite Images

“…The population has increased from 4 million in 2004 to 7 million in 2019. Because of the rate of growth observed in Riyadh, the city is now recognized as one of the fastestgrowing in the world by population [46]. Riyadh is located at GPS coordinates of 24°46 27.3540 N and 46°44 18.9096 E. Since 1932, the size of what is now known as municipal Riyadh has more than doubled 1000 times, and the population has more than doubled 200 times [46,47].…”

“…Because of the rate of growth observed in Riyadh, the city is now recognized as one of the fastestgrowing in the world by population [46]. Riyadh is located at GPS coordinates of 24°46 27.3540 N and 46°44 18.9096 E. Since 1932, the size of what is now known as municipal Riyadh has more than doubled 1000 times, and the population has more than doubled 200 times [46,47]. Aside from traffic issues and pollution, there is a significant social cost associated with the high number of car accidents, which result in one of the world's highest rates of death and casualties.…”