Analysing temporal and spatial urban sprawl change of Bursa city using landscape metrics and remote sensing

This paper aims to analyse the effect of spatio-temporal urban dynamics of Bursa city in terms of urban development trends and landscape metrics on the land use/cover change. Four different remotely sensed data recorded in 1979, 1989, 2000, 2013 and future simulation map of 2040 were used for the analysis. SLEUTH model in the frame of cellular automata was adopted for the future development. Object-based classification approach was used to extract the land use/cover maps and determine the quantity and quality of change in order to identify the land degradation. Eight urban landscape metrics were calculated from current and future land use/cover classification data. General phases of diffusion and coalescence in urban sprawl were revealed through the metric calculations. The most devastating change was defined on the agricultural lands. Metric results indicated that the irregular urban growth leads to an increase in patch number which ended up with the land degradation. Although the urbanization pattern mostly moved from the “seed” area to outwards for different time periods, the new spreading centres for the individual patches were observed for the future urban development. The empirical results and findings for historical and future land use/cover provided an insight to urban sprawl characteristics and further development of sustainable urban planning studies.