Modeling Urban Sprawls in Northeastern Illinois

Abstract

Like many metropolitan regions Chicago area characterized by Urban Sprawl. The ability to manage this Urban Sprawl for a sustainable future presents numerous challenges for geographers and planners. Nowadays remotely sensed data are inherently suited to provide information on urban land cover (LC) characteristics, change over time, and modeling. This paper has attempted to investigate Urban Sprawl in northeastern Illinois, and analyze its impact on the agricultural land and nature over time. The satellite images were acquired and classified to prepare the base maps, change detection was employed to analyze changes overtime. The Land Change modeler was used to predict the future urban growth of the area in 2020 and 2030. The results indicated that between (1989 and 2010) the built up area increased by 82.2%, which associated with a loss of 25.8% of the valuable agricultural lands and a decline in the urban open spaces and other landscape categories by 32.5%. The predicted maps showed an increase of built up land, which will cause further loss of agricultural lands mainly in the suburbs.