Long-term growth visualization and change detection for urban planning applications: a Springfield MO urbanized watershed

A long-term growth analysis was conducted for the City of Springfield, Missouri. The Springfield Department of Planning and Development was interested in determining the characteristics and patterns of urban growth within the metropolitan area over the past three decades. The interest in assessing urban growth and development trends within the region stems from present day environmental problems in areas recently annexed or areas that have undergone intensive development. A myriad of problems exist if the city continues to grow as expected (a fifty percent increase in area over the next 20 years). A historic look at urban growth through remote sensing allows planners and the public to visualize the expansion occurring in and around the city. The assessment of growth impacts uses a multi-tiered strategy where the NALC Landsat MSS triplicate sets provides long-term data for analysis and Landsat TM and ETM+ data provides the higher resolution data for a refined analysis. The methodology consisted of the identification of highly changed areas through numerous change detection techniques using the NALC data-sets. Once identified, the higher resolution data-sets were used to characterize the types of change that occurred. The authors present results dealing with one highly impacted area, that of a rapidly urbanized watershed. An assessment, such as the one presented, will aid determining environmental 'priority areas' due to urban growth and assist in developing growth policies.