Analysis of urban spatio-temporal land use/cover change and expansion with their driving force through remote sensing and GIS in Samara city, Russia

A dynamic study was carried out on urban land use/cover change and its built-up area expansion in Samara city from 1985 to 2015. Landsat satellite imageries of four different time periods were acquired by the Global Land Cover Facility Site and the earth explorer site. Supervised classification methodology was employed using the maximum likelihood technique in ArcGIS 10.1 Software. The results indicate that urban expansion of Samara city is very fast with high speed of economic development. During the 30-year period, the built-up area of Samara city attained a net increase of 147.62 km(2), and reached 419.26 km(2) in 2015, which is nearly double the estimate in 1985. The annual average expansion was 14.76 km(2) and the annual growth rate was 5.43%. Here, the rate of urban expansion varied in different periods and was the most outstanding in various periods in the southeast region of the city. The built-up area of Samara city was highly correlated with population and socio-economic activities, which was the main driving factor for urban expansion. This information on urban expansion and land use/cover change is very useful to the local government and urban planners in the implementation of future plans for sustainable development of the city.