Examining Urban Expansion in Greater Toronto Area through Landsat Images during Past 40 Years
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Wang, L.; 2Li, J.; 3Wang, S.; 4Li, W.
1UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO Email: l333wang@uwaterloo.ca
2UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO Email: junli@uwaterloo.ca
3UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO Email: s358wang@uwaterloo.ca
4UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO Email: w275li@uwaterloo.ca
Abstract
Urban expansion, as an important feature of urban study, has been paid a lot of attention for these years. Meanwhile, as one of the most vital economic centers of Canada, the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) experienced a vast urban expansion in the past 40 years. This paper aimed to use archive Landsat images to detect the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban expansion in the GTA from 1974 to 2014. In order to analysis the time series change detection, we carried out a post-classification comparison method. Then, the bi-temporally and the multi-temporally analysis results of different land use and land cover (LULC) types were obtained. In this paper, we quantitatively analyzed the urban expansion extent and spatial patterns, and integrated land-cover maps and population census data to obtain the relationship between LULC changes and population. Based on our final LULC change detection maps results, the GTA had a significant growth during the last 40 years, which the spatial expanded mainly in a radiated mode and a ribbon expansion mode. There were some strong correlations between urban growth and population in specify time periods. The result demonstrated that it is effective to combine the statistics data into remote sensing applications for analysis of urban expansions.
Keywords
urban expansion; Landsat; land use and land cover