Landsat’s Role in Supporting Urban Planning
Cities are places of light, action, complex social interactions, multi-faceted cultures, and fast-paced living. It’s no wonder cities are growing faster than rural areas. Earth experienced a milestone in the history of urban landscapes in 2008-09. More than 50 percent of the world’s human population now lives in areas of contiguous urban development. People are driving landscape-scale changes on our planet. Considering that people change the land surface, vegetation, water cycle, radiant heat, and other aspects of the landscape, the nature of this milestone has important implications for life. Using Landsat data, people can monitor urban change and also forecast patterns of change in future urban landscapes. Landsat sensors employ a spatial resolution of 30 m, an ideal scale for observing human impacts on the land. The sensors detect urban growth with visible and infrared reflectivity consistently, objectively, and dependably over time.
Springtime on an Urban Heat Island
How the urban heat island of Boston affects the growing season of vegetation in and around the city.
Mapping Cities Worldwide
We know very little about cities worldwide. In many instances we have little idea about the use and morphology of cities.
Vegetation Essential for Limiting City Warming Effects
Cities are well known hot spots – literally. The urban heat island effect has long been observed to raise the temperature of big cities by 1 to 3°C (1.8 to 5.4°F), a rise that is due to the presence of asphalt, concrete, buildings, and other so-called impervious surfaces disrupting the natural cooling effect provided by vegetation. According to a new NASA study that makes the first assessment of urbanization impacts for the entire continental United States, the presence of vegetation is an essential factor in limiting urban heating.
Deforestation Driven by 21st Century Urbanites
• A recently published Nature Geoscience article by Ruth DeFries et al. reveals that urban pressures (for food and resources) have replaced subsistence farmers as the leading driver of tropical deforestation this
Landsat Images Offer Clearer Picture of Changes in Chesapeake Watershed
• Images taken from satellites more than 400 miles above the Earth’s surface are bringing land-cover changes throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed into tighter focus. The images, which capture tracts
Landsat’s Role in Chesapeake Bay Management
• John Smith’s Bay Then & Now – When Captain John Smith first explored the Chesapeake Bay in 1607, the “Great Shellfish Bay,” as it was called by the Algonquian
