Abstract
Abstract. Situated in the southwest of Saudi Arabia, Mecca is considered the spiritual capital of one and a half billion worldwide Muslims. The city is visited by millions of pilgrims every year. It has undergone significant changes in land cover (LC) since the government first embarked on a series of ambitious development projects 20 years ago to accommodate the growing number of pilgrims and citizens. The main objective of our study is to detect, identify, analyze and measure the evolving land cover and urban morphology composition from multi-temporal satellite images. To characterize the morphological change during a period of twenty years, four satellite images, acquired in 1998 by Landsat TM and in 2003, 2008 and 2013 by Landsat ETM+, were classified into five main categories: Urban, Street, Soil and Vegetation. In addition, DEM has been extracted and included as Mountain. Change detection (CD) analysis is applied using post-classification comparison and GIS. As part of the study, morphological index, such as, Entropy is included for better understanding of urban structures behaviour. Mecca and its surroundings show a noticeable increase in urban and vegetation cover. Urban cover (UC) changes were divided into five radial directions: Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, East, and Northwest. These changes are influenced by mountain ranges surrounding the city and the highways. These revelations can play a significant role towards future planning and development activities, which may further promote urban growth.
Highlights
Rapid urban development and dramatic change of land cover (LC) have been recently witnessed in some developing countries as a result of rapid economic development (Yeh et al, 2001)
The results obtained through the analysis of multi-temporal satellite imageries are diagrammatically illustrated in Figure 4, and the individual class area and change statistics for the four years for Mecca are registered in tables 3
The results show that the high percentage of change between 1998 and 2013 were in NEP and SEP by an increase of 14.27 km2 (89.1%) and 11.20 km2 (71.18%) respectively, which represent approximately 58.2% of the total urban cover change of Mecca, which could be a result of the impact of the sacred sites of pilgrimage located there; urban development is affected by pilgrims’ activities (Ascoura, 2013)
Summary
Rapid urban development and dramatic change of LC have been recently witnessed in some developing countries as a result of rapid economic development (Yeh et al, 2001). Considering that the measurement and monitoring of changes in any area are crucial to government officials and planners who need updated information for planning and management purposes (Yeh et al, 2001), the main objective of this paper is to detect, identify, analyse and measure the composition of morphological change from multi-temporal satellite images using morphological indexes, in order to understand the behaviour of urban structures and patterns. During the last three decades, satellite time series, such as Landsat images have been exploited in several studies (Masek et al, 2000). It is widely used for LC monitoring and CD analysis by the use of timeseries analysis for urban sprawl phenomenon (Kamusoko et al, 2013). Entropy is one of the indexes that have been used to describe the structure and behaviour of different systems, such as LC changes (Cabral, 2013), the advantages of the entropy method are simplicity and easy integration with GIS (Yeh et al, 2001)
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