Dynamic Spatial Monitoring for Urbanization Area Sprawl and Land-Use Using Multi-Spectral and Temporal Remotely Sensed Satellite Images

Abstract

Spatio-temporal analysis for Urban Growth patterns is vital for city management and planning. Nowadays, AL-Hilla city is challenged lack of reliable urban datasets for urban sprawl management and planning. It suffered from a massive fragmentation of agricultural lands and orchards after 2003 and their transformation and conversion into residential lands, and that’s leads to a decrease in the plantation and vegetation lands, which affects the climate, increase temperatures, winds, and dust storms in the two past decades, especially in the summer and drought seasons. This study focuses on assessing, monitoring, and estimating the urbanization growth and detection of the changes in Land-Cover using different temporal, spectral, and spatial different satellite images. A supervised image classification technique, the Mahalanobis Distance (MD) was adopted. Three different maps of Land-Use/Land-Cover were generated for the period of 2002, 2011, and 2022, and were employed to assess and analyze the vegetation land degradation and urban sprawl quantitatively, and visually. A confusion Matrix was adopted to perform the accuracy assessment. A statistical comparison was conducted to calculate the changes between the land categories. It is found, over the past 20 years, urbanization increased rapidly in AL-Hilla city by 20.31km2, from 33.40 km2 in 2002 to about 73.97 km2 in 2022. An average annual increasing rate during the period from 2002 to 2011 was recorded at about 6.7%. However, urban area sprawl was higher for the next decade during the period from 2011 to 2022, with the increased rate of average annual recorded at about 3.8%. Urban area growth of AL-Hilla city increased three times from 2002 to 2022 and that is about 27.98% of the total area of AL-Hilla city. In general, this urban growth leads to the Urbanization sprawl, and expansion into other Lands classes; Water area, Soil area, and Vegetation area.