Monitoring Urban Land Cover/land Use Change In Algiers City Using Landsat Inmages (1987-2016)

Monitoring the urban land cover and land use change detection becomes one of the attention-catching issues for City planning because urbanization decreases cultivated areas.Remote sensing technologies provide critical insights and data that support rational solutions to land cover and use problems.Consequently,the purpose of our study is to monitor the urban land areas of Algiers City and to predict possible urban changes based on multi-temporal Landsat images,in order to sense the dynamics of annual growth in urban area use over the past 29 years,from 1987 to 2016.This study has proposed a new approach to monitor the land use/land cover change,and the key points are as following:1)pre-processing;2)selecting training samples;3)deriving land use map for Algiers City between years 1987 and 2016 by utilizing supervised classifier,support vector machine(SVM)algorithm;4)revealing the urban land use strategy of Algiers City based on change detection results.Over that period,areas extended to East,West,and South of the Central areas of the City.Furthermore,we validated these results with statistical data on urban growth collected from National Office of Statistics.This study has attached great importance to the impact of rapid urban land use change on social,economic,and environmental sustainability and then we extracted the urban land extent(ULE),the annual change of urban land(ACUL),the saturation of urban land(SUL),and the density of urban land(DUL)maps of Algiers.The experimental results verified that the proposed concept is feasible for evaluation of urban spatial planning,and is meaningful for guiding the rational distribution of urban space,controlling the scale of development,improving-the quality of urbanization and utilizing limited land resource effectively.This study helps to solve the absence problem of available data in Algiers City,especially the lack of reliable data.To better support the urban environmental planning,experimental models will be developed which is capable of predicting the future land changes in a statistically significant level of confidence.Meanwhile,for sustainable development,the establishment of reasonable control requires a wide and deep understanding of many social economy aspects about this region.Thus,it is necessary to assess the spatial and temporal patterns of cities in Algiers to support policy making in urban planning and environmental management,in rejoinder to display urbanization results of this region in time.If the economic development is promoted excessively,the political challenges of urbanization naturally follow,as the urban population improves their economic conditions,more land is consumed.And that interdependence tends to increase the rate of urbanization.