Abstract
Urban built-up area, one of the most important measures of an urban landscape, is an essential variable for understanding ecological and socioeconomic processes in urban systems. With an interest in urban development in transitional economies in Southeast Asia, we recognized a lack of high-to-medium resolution (<60 m) built-up information for countries in the region, including Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar. In this study, we combined multiple remote sensing data, including Landsat, DMSP/OLS night time light, MODIS NDVI data and other ancillary spatial data, to develop a 30-m resolution urban built-up map of 2010 for the above four countries. Following the trend analysis of the DMSP/OLS time series and the 2010 urban built-up extent, we also quantified the spatiotemporal dynamics of urban built-up areas from 1992 to 2010. Among the four countries, Vietnam had the highest proportion of urban built-up area (0.91%), followed by Myanmar (0.15%), Cambodia (0.12%) and Laos (0.09%). Vietnam was also the fastest in new built-up development (increased ~8.8-times during the 18-year study period), followed by Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, which increased at 6.0-, 3.6- and 0.24-times, respectively.
Highlights
Urban and its surrounding areas are hotspots of human-induced land cover/use change.Though relatively small in area, the extent and change that urbanized lands have on socioeconomic and ecosystem functions, including human health and well-being, climate, water conservation, air pollution (e.g., PM2.5 ), biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and carbon cycling [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], are disproportionate at multiple scales
Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar since the transition started from planning-based economies to market-based economies, as that is the key information in assessing the impact of urbanization to market-based economies, as that is the key information in assessing the impact of urbanization on on biodiversity, carbon and hydrological processes, environmental conditions and in understanding biodiversity, carbon and hydrological processes, environmental conditions and in understanding the the social-economic drivers of urbanization
We developed a 30-m resolution urban built-up map of Southeast Asian transitional economies (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar) in 2010 by developing an object-based classification approach and by fusing data from multiple sources
Summary
Urban and its surrounding areas are hotspots of human-induced land cover/use change.Though relatively small in area, the extent and change that urbanized lands have on socioeconomic and ecosystem functions, including human health and well-being, climate (e.g., urban heat island), water conservation (e.g., rainfall), air pollution (e.g., PM2.5 ), biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and carbon cycling [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9], are disproportionate at multiple scales. Urban and its surrounding areas are hotspots of human-induced land cover/use change. Southeast Asia is currently one of the fastest urbanizing regions in the world [11], with rapid urbanization occurring in countries under transitional economies (e.g., Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam). These countries have experienced major shifts from centralized and planned economies to free market economies since the 1980s, which were characterized by liberalization, macroeconomic stabilization, restructuring and privatization and legal and institutional reforms.
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