Enhanced Urban Sprawl Monitoring over the Entire District of Rome through Joint Analysis of ALOS AVNIR-2 and SENTINEL-2A Data

Abstract

Based on the continuation of our past study, the present analysis is conducted to examine recent effects of the urbanization process occurring over the entire district of Rome. Overlays of ALOS AVNIR-2 and SENTINEL-2A satellite images, collected over a 6 years period, were validated via Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques, in a particular procedure applied to urban land and agricultural transformations. The use of Copernicus SENTINEL-2A imagery has improved the previous results on urban processes, by reducing the uncertainty of the discrimination of land cover classes and facilitating the photo-interpretation. Statistical analysis was performed via the Urban Area Profile index in order to quantify the sprawl phenomenon, by defining several landscape metrics. This work, to be enriched in the future by means of complementary information available from Copernicus radar sensors, like the one onboard Sentinel-1, completes the series of observations on land use published by the Italian National Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, which stopped back in 2008.

Urban Land Mapping Based on Remote Sensing Time Series in the Google Earth Engine Platform: A Case Study of the Teresina-Timon Conurbation Area in Brazil

“…The use of Landsat historical imagery is well documented in the literature for monitoring urban sprawl [48][49][50][51]. On the other hand, Sentinel-2 satellites are still being evaluated [52][53][54], and we demonstrated that the urban land classes selected for this study were well classified. The ability of Sentinel-2 imagery to distinguish different types of roofs opens new possibilities for modeling populational densities in the urban land.…”