LCLUC

Project Summary

Urbanization continues to be one of the leading drivers of Land Cover Use Change (LCLUC) globally, although African countries appear to be at the forefront of these current urban expansion trends. This NASA Land-Cover/Land-Use Change (LCLUC) project developed new satellite-based approaches for monitoring rapid urbanization and its social and ecological consequences across Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa. Recognizing that traditional mapping approaches often capture either broad patterns of urban growth or fine-scale differences within individual cities, the project developed a multi-tier mapping framework that combines national-scale land-use monitoring with increasingly detailed maps of urban land cover and resources. Using these products, we developed automated methods for tracking changing urban boundaries, identified hotspots where land consumption is outpacing population growth using United Nations Sustainable Development Goal indicators, and examined patterns of urban expansion, infilling, and leapfrog development. At finer scales, the project used high- and very-high-resolution satellite imagery to characterize the diversity of land cover within cities and assess important resources such as urban green and open spaces, including how conclusions about their availability and distribution can depend on the resolution and accessibility of satellite data. Together, the resulting open data products, mapping methods, and tools provide a transferable framework for understanding where and how cities are expanding and for supporting more sustainable and equitable urban planning in rapidly developing regions.

Research Objectives

Objective 1

Develop a multi-resolution remote sensing framework for characterizing LCLUC across the last 5 years (2015-2020) to quantify temporal and spatial trends of urban development across three African case study countries: Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa.

Objective 2

Identify “LCLUC hotspots” using the SDG indicator 11.3.1 and assess tradeoffs and synergies of social and ecosystem services impacted by LCLUC within and surrounding “hotspot” urban growth centers.

Objective 3

Within focal hotspot cities, incorporate very high resolution imagery for object based urban mapping for the assessment of the equitable distribution of social and ecological services to support policy and sustainable planning goals.

Project Outputs

Publications

Cardenas-Ritzert, O.S.E., Shah Heydari, S., Rode, D.T., Filippelli, S., Laituri, M., McHale, M.R., Vogeler, J.C. 2025. A comparison of urban green and open space land cover characterizations based on high and very-high resolution imagery: A case study in Mekelle, Ethiopia and Polokwane, South Africa. Frontiers in Remote Sensing, 6, p.1625373. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsen.2025.1625373

Laituri, M., Cardenas-Ritzert, O., Vogeler, J., Shah Heydari, S. and McHale, M. 2025. The last urban frontier-Assessing hotspots of urban change associated with LCLUC in Africa. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 7, p.1529440. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2025.1529440

Cardenas-Ritzert, O.S.E., Vogeler, J.C., Shah Heydari, S., Fekety, P.A., Laituri, M., McHale, M. 2024a. Automated geospatial approach for assessing SDG Indicator 11.3.1: A multi-level evaluation of urban land use expansion across Africa. ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf., 13, 226. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi13070226

Cardenas-Ritzert, O.S., Vogeler, J.C., Shah Heydari, S., Fekety, P.A., Laituri, M. and McHale, M.R. 2024b. Effects of land use data spatial resolution on SDG Indicator 11.3. 1 (urban expansion) assessments: A case study across Ethiopia. Sustainability, 16(22), p.9698. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16229698

Shah Heydari, S., Vogeler, J.C., Cardenas-Ritzert, O., Filippelli, S.K., McHale, M., & Laituri, M. 2024. Multi-tier land use and land cover mapping framework and its application in urbanization analysis in three African countries. Remote Sensing, 16(14), 2677. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs16142677

Spatial Data Products

Cardenas-Ritzert, O.S.E., S. Shah Heydari, D.T. Rode, and J. Vogeler. 2025. Urban Land Cover Maps for Mekelle, Ethiopia, and Polokwane, South Africa, 2020. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2413

Vogeler, J. & S. Shah Heydari. 2024. Annual Land Use and Urban Land Cover Maps: Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa 2016-2020. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/2367

Code Repositories

https://github.com/VogelerLab/Multi-tier-LCLU

https://github.com/VogelerLab/SDG-11.3.1-Automated-Urban-Delineation-Code

Articles & Other Hightlights

NASA Earth Observatory Image of the Day Articles:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/154760/breaking-new-ground-in-mekele#:~:text=The%20pair%20of%20Landsat%20images,large%2Dscale%20planned%20residential%20neighborhoods.

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/human-dimensions/urban-development/rapid-growth-for-benin-city/