Abstract
The Las Vegas urban area expanded rapidly during the last two decades. In order to understand the impacts on the environment, it is imperative that the rate and type of urban expansion is determined. Remote sensing is an efficient and effective way to study spatial change in urban areas and Spectral Mixture Analysis (SMA) is a valuable technique to retrieve subpixel landcover information from remote sensing images. In this research, urban growth trends in Las Vegas are studied over the 1990 to 2010 period using images from Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and National Agricultural Imagery Program (NAIP). The SMA model of TM pixels is calibrated using high resolution NAIP classified image. The trends of land cover change are related to the land surface temperature trends derived from TM thermal infrared images. The results show that the rate of change of various land covers followed a linear trend in Las Vegas. The largest increase occurred in residential buildings followed by roads and commercial buildings. Some increase in vegetation cover in the form of tree cover and open spaces (grass) is also seen and there is a gradual decrease in barren land and bladed ground. Trend analysis of temperature shows a reduction over the new development areas with increased vegetation cover especially, in the form of golf courses and parks. This research provides a useful insight about the role of vegetation in ameliorating temperature rise in arid urban areas.
Highlights
The Las Vegas urban area expanded rapidly during the last two decades [1]
The spatial analysis of the land cover images depicts a consistent behavior about the urban expansion in Las Vegas
In Las Vegas valley, the road network expansion is a surrogate of the urban expansion and shows that it is reaching its limit of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
Summary
The Las Vegas urban area expanded rapidly during the last two decades [1]. The expansion slowed during 2007–2009 recession, but more recently, the development activities have regained momentum.Las Vegas development has mostly consisted of residential and commercial areas. It is important to monitor and understand the expansion of the Las Vegas urban area. In order to understand and model these processes, it is imperative that the rate and type of urban expansion is determined [4]. Urban areas have complex dynamics and it is imperative to monitor, understand, and predict their growth for sustainable development [21,22]. GIS has been successfully applied to model urban sprawl [23,24], determine urban land use change [10], and predict long-term urban growth [25,26]. Bhatta [12] has analyzed various statistical methods in GIS and remote sensing applications to study urban development and growth processes. Wichansky et al [30]
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