RESEARCH | urbansprawl

Land Cover Classification and Change Analysis of the

Twin Cities Metro Area by Multitemporal Remote Sensing.

Analysis of four sets of Landsat Imagery over a 16 year

period to track the growth of urban land use.

Found that there was 70,000 ha of total growth in urban

land use over that time period. 75% of that land was former agricultural land

Fei Yuan, Kali E. Sawaya,

Brian C. Loeffelholz, Marvin E. Bauer

Causes of Sprawl: A Portrait From Space

Marcy Burchfield,

Henry G. Overman, &

Matthew A. Turner

Study of the extent to which US urban development is sprawling and consider what determines differences

in sprawl across space. Using remote-sensing data

to track the evolution of land use on a grid of

8.7 billion 30x30 metre cells, we measure sprawl as

the amount of undeveloped land surrounding an

average urban dwelling. On this measure, while the

extent of sprawl remained roughly unchanged

between 1976 and 1992, it varied dramatically across metropolitan areas. Ground water availability,

temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralized

employment, early public transport infrastructure,

uncertainty about metropolitan growth, and

unincorporated land in the urban fringe all increase

sprawl.