Mapping Atlanta's Land Use/cover Change and Its Impact on the Environment Using Time Sequential Landsat Images

Time sequential Landsat MSS and TM images were used to map land use/cover of the Atlanta metropolitan area for the past 25 years as a component of the NASA-funded Project ATLANTA (ATlanta Land-use ANalysis: Temperature and Air-quality), which has the objective to model the impact of land use/cover change on temperature and air quality in Atlanta. This paper describes a suite of techniques that have been developed to ensure high accuracy of land use/cover classification from these satellite images with varying quality. Post-classification comparison with GIS overlay to map the spatial dynamics of land use/cover change was conducted. A GIS database of land use/cover at the county level was created, which integrates biophysical data (air temperature, rainfall, surface temperature, normalized difference vegetation index) with demographic/socio-economic data from the censuses (population density, housing, per capita income, education). Interrelationships among these data were investigated, and the impact of land use/cover changes on the environment was clearly revealed. The analysis has succeeded in uncovering the socio-economic causes of land use/cover change. Initial findings suggested that an increase in personal income has brought about a corresponding increase in residential development at the expense of forest and cropland, which in turn has brought about an increase in urban heat island effect. Through the use of an animation sequence of the land use/cover maps, the processes of urban development in Atlanta through time were vividly displayed.