Spatial and temporal land use change and occupation over the last half century in a peri-urban area

Abstract Understanding the reorganisation of land in order to adapt its use and spatial structure to social demands has become crucial to management and represents a major challenge to land use planning and public policies. This study explores the temporal and spatial land use change transitions in a peri-urban area of a medium-sized city located in the central Portugal and characterised by profound changes in the last half century. The study is supported by a collection of seven years/moments of image analysis (the 1958, 1973, 1979, 1995, 2002 and 2007 maps). Cross-referencing the successive sets of images defines the percentage of land transition and provides the stability grade (SG), which expresses the total proportion of the landscape that has not experienced any transition to a different category of land use. In order to evaluate the intensity of urban expansion, an annual rate of artificialisation of surfaces (AS) indicator was used. The seven cartographic outputs highlight a decrease in the area occupied by permanent crops, an increase in urban areas, especially the continuous urban fabric, a large forest occupation involving different typologies and paths, and an increase in base soil areas. The data also shows a general increase in the number of patches recognised and in pattern complexity. The results show that land use changes are created by systematic transitions, with or without gross variations, and also by casuistic processes associated with an increase in artificialised areas and the growth of the continuous urban fabric. Land use transition reflects the internal and external inputs associated with the approval of Municipal Master Plans and the land regulatory regime, and also the consolidation of the road infrastructure network. The analysis indicates that the transfer takes place in a set of small sequential steps marking the evolution from rural characteristics to a process of peri-urbanisation, ending in urban consolidation.

[1]  Robert Gilmore Pontius,et al.  Assessing a predictive model of land change using uncertain data , 2010, Environ. Model. Softw..

[2]  Carlo Lavalle,et al.  Urban land use scenarios for a tourist region in Europe: Applying the MOLAND model to Algarve, Portugal , 2009 .

[3]  Richard Aspinall,et al.  Modelling land use change with generalized linear models--a multi-model analysis of change between 1860 and 2000 in Gallatin Valley, Montana. , 2004, Journal of environmental management.

[4]  Eric F. Lambin,et al.  Land-use and land-cover change : local processes and global impacts , 2010 .

[5]  Thomas J. Sebo.  Digital Image Analysis , 1995 .

[6]  G. Heilig,et al.  Socio-economic driving forces of land-use change in Kunshan, the Yangtze River Delta economic area of China. , 2007, Journal of environmental management.

[7]  R. Lathrop,et al.  Land resource impact indicators of urban sprawl , 2003 .

[8]  L. S. Pereira,et al.  Remote sensing based indicators of changes in a mountain rural landscape of Northeast Portugal , 2011 .

[9]  Abigail M. York,et al.  Land fragmentation due to rapid urbanization in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area: Analyzing the spatiotemporal patterns and drivers , 2012 .

[10]  José I. Barredo,et al.  Are European Cities Becoming Dispersed? A Comparative Analysis of 15 European Urban Areas , 2006 .

[11]  A. Braimoh.  Random and systematic land-cover transitions in northern Ghana , 2006 .

[12]  M. Antrop.  Why landscapes of the past are important for the future , 2005 .

[13]  B. Fu,et al.  Dynamics and driving factors of agricultural landscape in the semiarid hilly area of the Loess Plateau, China , 2004 .

[14]  Satoru Okubo,et al.  Urbanization linked with past agricultural landuse patterns in the urban fringe of a deltaic Asian mega-city: a case study in Bangkok , 2005 .

[15]  John F. Richards,et al.  The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution.@@@The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere Over the Past 300 Years. , 1993 .

[16]  Erik Andersson,et al.  Patterns and scale relations among urbanization measures in Stockholm, Sweden , 2009, Landscape Ecology.

[17]  D. Ludlow.  Urban Sprawl in Europe - The Ignored Challenge , 2006 .

[18]  Jianping Wu,et al.  Monitoring urban expansion and land use/land cover changes of Shanghai metropolitan area during the transitional economy (1979–2009) in China , 2011, Environmental monitoring and assessment.

[19]  J. Bouma,et al.  Land use change under conditions of high population pressure : the case of Java , 1999 .

[20]  R. Tateishi,et al.  Evaluating urban expansion and land use change in Shijiazhuang, China, by using GIS and remote sensing , 2006 .

[21]  R. G. Pontius,et al.  Detecting important categorical land changes while accounting for persistence , 2004 .

[22]  William L. Stefanov,et al.  Land use and land cover mapping from diverse data sources for an arid urban environments , 2006, Comput. Environ. Urban Syst..

[23]  M. Ramsey,et al.  Monitoring urban land cover change: An expert system approach to land cover classification of semiarid to arid urban centers , 2001 .

[24]  Jose L. Casanova,et al.  Land use mapping methodology using remote sensing for the regional planning directives in Segovia, Spain , 2003 .

[25]  Xavier Pons,et al.  Land-cover and land-use change in a Mediterranean landscape: A spatial analysis of driving forces integrating biophysical and human factors , 2008 .

[26]  Shiliang Su,et al.  Transformation of agricultural landscapes under rapid urbanization: A threat to sustainability in Hang-Jia-Hu region, China , 2011 .

[27]  J. Graaff,et al.  Historical review of land use changes in Portugal (before and after EU integration in 1986) and their implications for land degradation and conservation, with a focus on Centro and Alentejo regions , 2011 .

[28]  R. Pontius,et al.  Analysis of twenty years of categorical land transitions in the Lower Hunter of New South Wales, Australia , 2010 .

[29]  Bojie Fu,et al.  Land-use change in a small catchment of northern Loess Plateau, China , 2001 .

[30]  John F. Mustard,et al.  How much is built? Quantifying and interpreting patterns of built space from different data sources , 2011 .

[31]  José I. Barredo,et al.  The MOLAND Modelling Framework for Urban and Regional Land Use Dynamics , 2007 .

[32]  Hong S. He,et al.  The wildland–urban interface dynamics in the southeastern U.S. from 1990 to 2000 , 2008 .

[33]  M. Bossard,et al.  CORINE land cover technical guide - Addendum 2000 , 2000 .

[34]  A. Otte,et al.  Analysing land-cover changes in relation to environmental variables in Hesse, Germany , 2004, Landscape Ecology.

[35]  Xianzhang Pan,et al.  Measurement of urbanization process and the paddy soil loss in Yixing city, China between 1949 and 2000 , 2007 .

[36]  K. Takeuchi,et al.  Landform transformation on the urban fringe of Bangkok: The need to review land-use planning processes with consideration of the flow of fill materials to developing areas , 2008 .