Mapping 2000-2010 Impervious Surface Change in India Using Global Land Survey Landsat Data

Understanding and monitoring the environmental impacts of global urbanization requires better urban datasets. Continuous field impervious surface change (ISC) mapping using Landsat data is an effective way to quantify spatiotemporal dynamics of urbanization. It is well acknowledged that Landsat-based estimation of impervious surface is subject to seasonal and phenological variations. The overall goal of this paper is to map 2000–2010 ISC for India using Global Land Survey datasets and training data only available for 2010. To this end, a method was developed that could transfer the regression tree model developed for mapping 2010 impervious surface to 2000 using an iterative training and prediction (ITP) approachAn independent validation dataset was also developed using Google EarthTM imagery. Based on the reference ISC from the validation dataset, the RMSE of predicted ISC was estimated to be 18.4%. At 95% confidence, the total estimated ISC for India between 2000 and 2010 is 2274.62 ± 7.84 km2.