The city of Rostock in East Germany has undergone drastic changes in the last 15 years since the reunification of Germany. To cover the spatial extent of the urban developments and the changes in land use different remote sensing sensors and image analysis techniques were used. The land use of 1989 and 1995 was determined at a 1:50.000 scale based on fused Landsat TM and SPOT satellite scenes. ...

This doctoral thesis investigates the potential of classification methods based on spatial context to infer specific forms of land use from remote sensing data. The problem is that some types of land use are characterized by a complex configuration of land covers that traditional per-pixel based methods have problems classifying due to spectral heterogeneity. The problem of spectral heterogenei...

This chapter introduces our newly developed Spatially explicit Urban Land-use Model (SULM) as a tool for resilient urban planning. The SULM can create land-use and social economic scenarios at micro districts level based on an urban economic theory. In order to co-design transformative urban plans with local stake holders, it is important to visualize possible future land-use scenarios. This mo...

The paper studies the optimal distribution of business and residential land in a circular city. Once the optimum is characterized, we analyze the effect of changes in commuting costs and externality parameters. We also propose policies like labor subsidies, land taxes and zoning restrictions that can implement the efficient allocation as an equilibrium, or close the gap between the optimal and ...

urban expansion and agriculture intensification are relevant drivers in land degradation (ld)processes in europe due to net loss of land, soil sealing, landscape fragmentation and other negative effects on the environment. this paper explores changes (or “trajectories” of change) in land use and cover (lulc) and their relationship with the consumption of soils in emilia-romagna (northern italy)...

Land is one of the prime natural resources. A city grows not only by population but also by changes in spatial dimensions. Urban population growth and urban sprawl induced land use changes and land transformation. The land transformation is a natural process and cannot be stopped but it can be regulated. Many geographical changes at the urban periphery are associated with the transfer of land f...

Changes in land use disrupt ecosystem patterns and processes and serve as precursors to other biotic and abiotic stressors. Forest ecosystems in the urban core typically differ structurally and functionally from those in rural areas. The overall objective of the study was to determine concentrations of selected air-borne contaminants (N, S, and heavy metals) over space and time and relate these...

Biosecurity issues in rural areas including the rural-urban fringe have been on the national government agenda for decades. However, these issues are rarely linked to the land use pattern and the planning processes that frame the peri-urbanisation process. International, national, regional and localised stressors leading to each new biosecurity threat seem to constantly overshadow the ongoing t...

Individuals generate vast amounts of geolocalized content through the use of mobile social media applications. In this context, Twitter has become an important sensor of the interactions between individuals and their environment. Building on this idea, the authors propose the use of geolocated tweets as a complementary source of information for urban planning applications, focusing on the chara...

Sustainable development, future studies, information technology, urban land-use and passenger transport . These are the five concepts upon which this thesis and the eight papers it contains are based. The thesis includes both a development of future studies methodology, especially with regard to backcasting, and analyses of the relationship between sustainable development, information technolog...