Human population growth and associated sprawl has rapidly converted open lands to developed use and affected their distinctive ecological characteristics. Missouri reflects a full range of sprawl characteristics that include large metropolitan centers, which led growth in 1980s, and smaller metropolitan and rural areas, which led growth in 1990s. In order to study the historical patterns of spr...

Research has found that urban fringe parks are particularly sensitive to population growth and rising demands for recreation and tourism. High visitor levels, a more sophisticated and demanding visitor, and park budgetary pressures have demanded a rethink of management approaches, including the benefits of partnerships. This paper describes two current partnerships in Australia where the manage...

The objective of this research is to evaluate multi-temporal RADARSAT-2 polarimetric SAR data for urban land-cover classification using a novel classification scheme. Six-date RADARSAT-2 Polarimetric SAR data in both ascending and descending orbits were acquired during June to September 2008 in the rural-urban fringe of the Greater Toronto Area. The major land-cover types are builtup areas, roa...

Toronto’s Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) has faced on-going challenges concerning its demographic shifts in the urban and rural fringe tending to become a megacity over the coming decades, due to rapid population increase and urban amalgamation. For this research we examine past urban land use transitions in Toronto’s CMA based on collected remote sensing data between 1973 and 2010. A Markov Ce...

In this study we tested whether AVIRIS data allowed for improved land use classification over synthetic Landsat ETM+ data for a location on the urban-rural fringe of Colorado. After processing the AVIRIS image and creating a synthetic Landsat image, we used standard classification and post-classification procedures to compare the data sources for land use mapping. We found that, for this locati...