The distinction among urban, periurban and rural areas represents a classical example of uncertainty in land classification. Satellite images, geostatistical analysis and all kinds of spatial data are very useful in urban sprawl studies, but it is important to define precise rules in combining great amounts of data to build complex knowledge about territory. Rough Set theory may be a useful met...

While several studies examined land use and land cover changes in the central and western parts of Saudi Arabia, this study is the first to use remote sensing data to examine the decadal land cover changes in Saudi Arabia’s eastern coastal city of Al-Khobar between 1990 and 2013. Specifically, it utilized ISODATA classification method to classify Landsat TM, ETM+, and OLI data collected from 19...

To investigate the effect of arable land protection policies in China, a practical framework that integrates geographic information systems (GIS), soil quality assessment and landscape metrics analysis was employed to track and analyze arable land transformations and landscape changes in response to rampant urbanization within the Ningbo region (China) from 2005 to 2013. The results showed that...

Many urban studies have been done to demonstrate that urban sprawl is not the right approach in hot climate cities. On the contrary, a compact design is recommended to enhance human thermal comfort. This research aims to clarify the relation between urban morphology and outdoor thermal comfort of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The aim is to develop an outstanding future strategic compact morphology that...

ABSTRA CT: Suburban sprawl has often been identified as low-density and dispersed development hat requires greater automobile vehicle miles to be traveled for daily activities thereby resulting in problematic environmental and social impacts. This paper attempts to empirically test one of the spatial characteristics of sprawl by measuring the actual road distance of residential housing units to...

Urbanisation and associated growth patterns (urban sprawl) are characteristic of spatial temporal land use changes taking place at regional levels. Unplanned urbanization and consequent impacts on natural resources including basic amenities has necessitated the investigation and understanding of mechanisms and dynamics of land use and land-use change on a range of spatial scales and evaluate th...

In this research, we propose to conduct diagnostic and predictive analysis about the key factors and consequences of urban population relocation. To achieve this goal, urban simulation models extract the urban development trends as land use change patterns from a variety of data sources. The results are treated as part of urban big data with other information such as population change and econo...

Despite the progress made in controlling local air pollution, urban areas show increasing signs of environmental stress and air quality is one of the major concerns. The findings of several studies provide evidence that the shape of a city and the land use distribution determine the location of emission sources and the pattern of urban traffic, affecting urban air quality. This work focuses on ...