Analyzing land use land cover change patterns and population dynamics of fast-growing US cities: evidence from Collin County, Texas

Keywords: LULCC, Markov chain, geostatistics
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 50

Abstract

Land use and land cover (LULC) change is crucial for understanding human impact on the environment. The southern and western parts of the United States have experienced rapid population growth in the past decades. This paper analyzed the LULC change patterns and population dynamics in Collin County of Texas from 2000 to 2019. Landsat images and population data from US Census were analyzed in this study. Supervised maximum likelihood classifier was used to obtain the pre-classified land cover maps. We interpreted the land cover classes for three sets of pixels from multiple sources and used them as the input for post-classification. A CoMCRF based post-classification was further performed on each of the pre-classified land cover maps. The post-classification improved the overall classification accuracy. Based on the post-classified land cover maps, we found that the LULC change in Collin County is primarily converting field lands to human built land covers. OLS and GWR are further employed to investigate the county-level and local relationships between built-up area change ratio and population change ratio during the period from 2010 to 2019. This case study for Collin County of Texas provides some insights on the most recent LULC change patterns and their relations with population dynamics in fast-growing US cities.