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. In fact, predictions indicate that there will be more people living in cities in Africa in the next 30 years, than there are people living in cities right now around the world; with this increase in population growth it is also expected that we will see a 12-fold increase in urban land area. To date, the study of urbanization and its consequences and impacts has occurred at two very different scales and resolutions: (1) Large scale urbanization patterns (regional, national, or global) mapped at lower resolutions (≥30m pixels) , and; (2) small scale (city, neighborhood, parcel) urban heterogeneity mapped at high resolutions (<5m pixels). One approach is good for understanding urban growth, while the other method’s strength enables scientists to analyze landscape quality, human-environmental interactions, and tradeoffs in ecosystem services. This project aims to merge these divergent characterizations of urbanization so that we can capture large scale urbanization processes, while still quantifying the heterogeneity and quality of urban land uses across three African case study countries: Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa. Furthermore, with this approach we can capture diverse multifunctional land uses within and around cities that provide a number of important ecosystem services to people near and far.

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.

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/