scholarly journals An Application for Regional Coastal Erosion Processes in Urban Areas: A Case Study of the Golden Horseshoe in Canada

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Vaz ◽  
Lisa Bowman

Urban growth has had unprecedented consequences on environmental sustainability and anthropogenic activity. The eroding coastlines throughout the world are subject to the massive expansion of urban areas and the accountability of sustainable hinterland landscapes. The Golden Horseshoe is Canada’s fastest growing region extending from the Niagara Peninsula and one of the most active economic regions in North America. This paper adopts a combined assessment of land use change and transitions in the coastal stretches of the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Comprising the urban expansion of the region between 1990 and 2011, an integrated assessment was carried out to: (i) detect changes in coastal lines along Lake Ontario; (ii) derive land use changes along the coast through spatial accounting matrices; and (iii) integrate climate change data for a combined assessment of future erosion loci. Visible erosion was found between the decade of 1990 and 2000, while certain areas have shown coastal recession in the southern region. The maximum recession was found to be 30 m, with an increasing urban sprawl of 19.8% between 1990 and 2000. A combined temperature increase of 2 °C over the coming decades brings the increase in urban heat islands leading to the importance of combined land policies to mitigate the common problem of erosion in vulnerable urban stretches and liveability concerning spatial resilience of growing urban regions in North America.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Vaz ◽  
Lisa Bowman

Urban growth has had unprecedented consequences on environmental sustainability and anthropogenic activity. The eroding coastlines throughout the world are subject to the massive expansion of urban areas and the accountability of sustainable hinterland landscapes. The Golden Horseshoe is Canada’s fastest growing region extending from the Niagara Peninsula and one of the most active economic regions in North America. This paper adopts a combined assessment of land use change and transitions in the coastal stretches of the Greater Golden Horseshoe. Comprising the urban expansion of the region between 1990 and 2011, an integrated assessment was carried out to: (i) detect changes in coastal lines along Lake Ontario; (ii) derive land use changes along the coast through spatial accounting matrices; and (iii) integrate climate change data for a combined assessment of future erosion loci. Visible erosion was found between the decade of 1990 and 2000, while certain areas have shown coastal recession in the southern region. The maximum recession was found to be 30 m, with an increasing urban sprawl of 19.8% between 1990 and 2000. A combined temperature increase of 2 °C over the coming decades brings the increase in urban heat islands leading to the importance of combined land policies to mitigate the common problem of erosion in vulnerable urban stretches and liveability concerning spatial resilience of growing urban regions in North America.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhagawat Rimal ◽  
Sean Sloan ◽  
Hamidreza Keshtkar ◽  
Roshan Sharma ◽  
Sushila Rijal ◽  
...  

Globally, urbanization is increasing at an unprecedented rate at the cost of agricultural and forested lands in peri-urban areas fringing larger cities. Such land-cover change generally entails negative implications for societal and environmental sustainability, particularly in South Asia, where high demographic growth and poor land-use planning combine. Analyzing historical land-use change and predicting the future trends concerning urban expansion may support more effective land-use planning and sustainable outcomes. For Nepal’s Tarai region—a populous area experiencing land-use change due to urbanization and other factors—we draw on Landsat satellite imagery to analyze historical land-use change focusing on urban expansion during 1989–2016 and predict urban expansion by 2026 and 2036 using artificial neural network (ANN) and Markov chain (MC) spatial models based on historical trends. Urban cover quadrupled since 1989, expanding by 256 km2 (460%), largely as small scattered settlements. This expansion was almost entirely at the expense of agricultural conversion (249 km2). After 2016, urban expansion is predicted to increase linearly by a further 199 km2 by 2026 and by another 165 km2 by 2036, almost all at the expense of agricultural cover. Such unplanned loss of prime agricultural lands in Nepal’s fertile Tarai region is of serious concern for food-insecure countries like Nepal.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charline Giguet-Covex ◽  
Qi Lin ◽  
Ludovic Gielly ◽  
Fabien Arnaud ◽  
Ke Zhang

<p>More than 80% of shallow lake ecosystems in the Yangtze floodplain suffer significant disturbances from the 50’s, especially eutrophication. These environmental degradations and subsequent loss of services are related with the important and rapid development of the agriculture, industry, urban areas and the population boom in the region. Lake Taihu is one of the largest lakes of the floodplain and represents an important water resource (for drinking and fishing) for the population of the two big cities on the lake shore. This lake experimented two shifts toward the degradation of the trophic state: one in the 50-60’s and a second in 80’s.</p><p>In order to document the causes of these ecological shifts, we applied the DNA metabarcoding approach on lake sediments and focused on plants as proxy of land use. Whereas this proxy has been successfully applied in many lakes over the world, it has never been tested in large shallow lakes and not in China either.</p><p>We show important changes in land use in 50’s and 80’s related with agricultural developments (i.e. intensification) and urban expansion, respectively. In fact, in the 50’s crop plants are increasing (rapeseed and/or cabbage, rice and/or wheat, barley and <em>Poaceae</em>) whereas in 80’s, we record the development of several plants associated to gardens (e.g. ornamental species). Moreover, this last period is characterised by the presence of trees mostly cultivated along stream banks to protect dikes against erosion. Between the 80’s and the years 2000, the plant diversity recorded in the sediment strongly increase, which may be due to higher detrital inputs (i.e. more efficient DNA transfer). The timing in land-use changes corresponds to the main shifts in lake trophic state.</p>


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 95-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Han Soo Lee ◽  
Andhang Rakhmat Trihamdani ◽  
Tetsu Kubota ◽  
Satoru Iizuka ◽  
Tran Thi Thu Phuong

2017 ◽  
Vol 198 ◽  
pp. 525-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andhang Rakhmat Trihamdani ◽  
Tetsu Kubota ◽  
Han Soo Lee ◽  
Kento Sumida ◽  
Tran Thi Thu Phuong

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-172
Author(s):  
Iswari Nur Hidayati ◽  
R Suharyadi

Impervious surface is one of the major land cover types of urban and suburban environment. Conversion of rural landscapes and vegetation area to urban and suburban land use is directly related to the increase of the impervious surface area. The impervious surface expansion is straight-lined with decreasing green spaces in urban areas. Impervious surface is one of indicator for detecting urban heat islands. This study compares various indices for mapping impervious surfaces using Landsat 8 OLI imagery by optimizing the different spectral characteristics of Landsat 8 OLI imagery. The research objectives are (1) to apply various indices for impervious surface mapping and (2) identifies impervious surfaces in urban areas based on multiple indices and provide recommendations and find the best index for mapping impervious surface in urban areas. In addition to utilizing the index, land use supervised classification method, maximum likelihood classification used for extracting built-up, and non-built-up areas. Accuracy assessment of this research used field data collection as primary data for calculating kappa coefficient, producer accuracy, and user accuracy. The study can also be extended to find the land surface temperature and correlate the impervious surface extraction data with urban heat islands.


Land ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Shade ◽  
Peleg Kremer

Urbanization is a rapid global trend, leading to consequences such as urban heat islands and local flooding. Imminent climate change is predicted to intensify these consequences, forcing cities to rethink common infrastructure practices. One popular method of adaptation is green infrastructure implementation, which has been found to reduce local temperatures and alleviate excess runoff when installed effectively. As cities continue to change and adapt, land use/landcover modeling becomes an important tool for city officials in planning future land usage. This study uses a combination of cellular automata, machine learning, and Markov chain analysis to predict high resolution land use/landcover changes in Philadelphia, PA, USA for the year 2036. The 2036 landcover model assumes full implementation of Philadelphia’s green infrastructure program and past temporal trends of urbanization. The methodology used to create the 2036 model was validated by creating an intermediate prediction of a 2015 landcover that was then compared to an existing 2015 landcover. The accuracy of the validation was determined using Kappa statistics and disagreement scores. The 2036 model successfully met Philadelphia’s green infrastructure goals. A variety of landscape metrics demonstrated an overall decrease in fragmentation throughout the landscape due to increases in urban landcover.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martí Bosch ◽  
Maxence Locatelli ◽  
Perrine Hamel ◽  
Roy P. Remme ◽  
Jérôme Chenal ◽  
...  

Abstract. Mitigating urban heat islands has become an important objective for many cities experiencing heat waves. Despite notable progress, the spatial relationship between land use/land cover patterns and the distribution of air temperature remains poorly understood. This article presents a reusable computational workflow to simulate the spatial distribution of air temperature in urban areas from their land use/land cover data. The approach employs the InVEST urban cooling model, which estimates the cooling capacity of the urban fabric based on three biophysical mechanisms, i.e., tree shade, evapotranspiration and albedo. An automated procedure is proposed to calibrate the parameters of the model to best fit air temperature observations from monitoring stations. In a case study in Lausanne, Switzerland, spatial estimates of air temperature obtained with the calibrated model show that the urban cooling model outperforms spatial regressions based on satellite data. This represents two major advances in urban heat island modeling. First, unlike in black-box approaches, the calibrated parameters of the urban cooling model can be interpreted in terms of the physical mechanisms that they represent and can therefore help understanding how urban heat islands emerge in a particular context. Second, the urban cooling model requires only land use/land cover and reference temperature data and can therefore be used to evaluate synthetic scenarios such as master plans, urbanization prospects, and climate scenarios. The proposed approach provides valuable insights into the emergence of urban heat islands which can serve to inform urban planning and assist the design of heat mitigation policies.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inês Amorim Leitão ◽  
Carla Sofia Santos Ferreira ◽  
António José Dinis Ferreira

<p>Land-use changes affect the properties of ecosystems, and are typically associated with decreasing ability to supply services, which in turn causes a decrease in the social well-being. Urbanization is identified as one of the main causes of ecosystem degradation, once it is considered an artificial space that replaces natural areas.This study investigates the impact of land-use changes during 20 years (1995-2015) on the potential supply of ecosystem services in Coimbra municipality, central Portugal. The assessment was based on the evaluation performed by 31 experts familiar with the study area, through questionnaires. The experts ranked the potential supply of 31 ecosystem services, grouped in regulation, provisioning and cultural services, for the several land-uses existent. Experts performed a qualitative evaluation, considering ‘strong adverse potential’, ‘weak adverse potential’, ‘not relevant’, ‘low positive potential’ and ‘strong positive potential’. The qualitative evaluation was converted into a quantitative classification (-2, -1, 0, 1, 2). Quantitative values were then used to develop an ecosystem services quantification matrix and to map the information in the study area, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). An urban expansion from 14% to 18% was recorded over the last 20 years. Agricultural land decreased 8% due to conversion into forest (4% increase) and urban areas (4% increase). This has led to a decrease in the supply of provision (e.g. food) and regulation services (e.g. flood regulation). In fact, over the last years, recurrent floods have been increasingly noticed in Coimbra city. On the other hand, the growth of forest areas has led to an increase in general ESs supply. The adverse impacts of urbanization were partially compensated by enlarging the benefits provided by forest areas, which is the land-use with greatest ESs potential supply. In order to support urban planning and develop sustainable cities, it is essential to quantify the potential supply of ecosystem services considering local scale and characteristics.</p>


Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abebe Mengaw Wubie ◽  
Walter T. de Vries ◽  
Berhanu Kefale Alemie

The contemporary urbanization and its implication to land use dynamics especially in the peri-urban areas are emerging as a cross-cutting theme in policy debates and scientific discourse. As most cities in developing countries, including Ethiopia, are experiencing continuous expansion of built-ups and dynamic land use changes, monitoring and an in-depth analysis of the past, present and future predictions of these changes are important for a holistic understanding of the problem, its consequence, and to regulate proper land use intervention options. Thus, the main objective of this research is to assess land use dynamics and processes of land intervention in the peri-urban areas of Bahir Dar city using a socio-spatial analysis. It assesses to what extent the existing peri-urban land intervention processes and land use decisions are effective in combating and controlling unwanted land use changes. Primary socio-economic data were collected using questionnaires, focus group discussions (FGDs) and key informant interviews; in addition, spatial data including Landsat and Sentinel imageries of 1993, 2001, 2011 and 2020 were utilized. Land use/land cover (LULC) classes were computed using the integration of spectral and object-based image classification techniques. The results signal that built-ups are expanding horizontally with unpredicted patterns. This is because the existing land intervention processes are lacking effectiveness to govern the spatial patterns of built-ups. The results further depict that processes of land use intervention do not only determine horizontal urban expansion but also determine the nature of people-to-land relationships, which involve both formal and informal processes. This creates haphazard, disputed and unregulated land use systems in peri-urban areas of Bahir Dar. The socio-spatial methodology applied in this research is effective in monitoring both the spatial and social dimensions of land use changes. The spatial results effectively demonstrate the dynamics of land uses; whereas, the social analysis supports understanding of the processes of land use interventions. In conclusion, monitoring processes of land use interventions are key policy and decision making directions to regulate and manage land use dynamics in the peri-urban area.


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