Urban-Rural Interface Mapping Using Thermal Remote Sensing
Rapid exurban development in many regions of the United States warrant up-to-date land use maps. While land cover maps and change detection maps are freely available through National Land Cover Database (NLCD), these maps can be up to 5 years out-of date. It is possible to use other freely available, more up-to-date remote sensing products for mapping changing land uses in a mixed urban-rural landscape.
Increasingly, widespread changes in rural landscapes surrounding urban cores have important implications for biodiversity, ecological processes, and forest management activities. Among many other remotely sensed variables, land surface temperature retrieved from thermal infrared data has been widely used to characterize landscape properties, patterns, and processes (Quattrochi and Luvall 1999). Previous studies have linked land surface temperature with a myriad of factors including built-up area and height, urban and street geometry, vegetation, land use and land cover change, population distribution, and intensity of human activities (Weng 2009). Our objective is to test the capability of multi-sensor and multi-resolution thermal derived products to identify surface temperature gradients as they relate to different land uses, and to develop a standardized method to map the urban-rural interface across the United States.
This project is a collaboration between the USDA Forest Service Remote Sensing Application Center and the Family Forest Research Center along with the USDA Northern Research Station, the Southern Research Station, and the Pacific Northwest Research Station.
References
- Quattrochi, D.A., Luvall, J.C. 1999. Thermal infrared remote sensing for analysis of landscape ecological processes: Methods and applications. Landscape Ecology 14 (6), 577-598.
- Weng, Q., 2009. Thermal infrared remote sensing for urban climate and environmental studies: Methods, applications, and trends. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 64, 335-344.
