Project Funding: 2015 - 2018

NRA: 2013 NASA: Land Cover / Land Use Change   

Funded by NASA

Abstract:
Urbanization is a global megatrend that is transforming human settlements and land cover and land use. The shift from primarily rural to more urban societies is evident across multiple dimensions: urban areas are home more than 50% of the global population, generate over 90% of the global GDP, and account for about 75% of total global energy consumption. UN projections suggest that today’s urban populations of 3.5 billion will increase to 6 billion by 2030, and recent forecasts show that urban areas will expand threefold between 2000 and 2030 to accommodate this growth. Due to the growing importance of urbanization-related issues in global change, the international science and policy communities” including the IPCC, the US National Climate Assessment, and the UN”are increasingly requesting information about urban areas at the global scale. The overarching goal of the proposed research is to formulate an assessment of the patterns, drivers, and outcomes of global urban LCLUC from 1972 to 2014 by synthesizing existing remote sensing research and published studies from around the world. We aim to assess how the myriad urban remote sensing studies contribute to advancing fundamental and theoretical knowledge of urbanization, sustainability, and the functioning of the Earth system. This synthesis project will examine five key research questions. Question 1. What are the existing and available remotely sensed datasets and analyses on urban LCLUC? Question 2. What are the available change detection algorithms to characterize urban LCLUC and can we develop best practices to guide which change detection algorithms to apply across different geographies, conditions, and applications? Question 3. What are spatial patterns of urban LCLUC and how do they vary across place, time, and economic development levels? Question 4. What are the socioeconomic and policy drivers of urban LCLUC across different world regions, stages of economic development, and land use histories? Question 5. What are the effects of urban LCLUC on other land uses and land covers? The key methods to implement the proposed project include: systematic literature review and data collection, statistical meta-analysis, researcher and stakeholder workshops, and Delphi techniques. The proposed project will leverage a unique database that took more than two years for the project team to create. It is a database of 181 English-language, peer-reviewed papers published between 1988 and 2008 on remote sensing of urban expansion. The database includes 326 case studies of 292 unique geographic locations distributed across 67 countries in all continents except Antarctica. This database will be expanded both with respect to depth and breadth for the purposes of the proposed project. The research questions and tasks are closely aligned with the current LCLUC synthesis solicitation. Specifically, this project will: 1) Summarize the state-of-the-art knowledge on urban LCLUC and advance our understanding of their patterns, processes, drivers, and impacts; 2) Identify gaps in data, research, and knowledge about urban LCLUC; 3) Leverage support from other agencies, institutions, and organizations to fund workshops that enable broader participation from the scientific community and provide opportunities for US scientists to engage with international researchers; 4) Generate new understanding and conceptual frameworks that will enhance the conceptual underpinnings of urban LCLUC science. The project will partner with the IHDP (soon to be Future Earth) Project on Urbanization and Global Environmental Change (UGEC) to engage an international network of urban LCLUC researchers. One of the main outputs of the proposed project is an open access digital data archive hosted on the UGEC website (http://ugec.org).