Urban Environments

Urbanization has dramatically changed Earth’s surface. This chapter starts with a qualitative look at the impact urban expansion has on the landscape, covering three existing urban classification schemes that have been created by other remote sensing scientists. We look at how these classifications can be used to quantify urban areas, and close with instructions on how to perform per-pixel supervised image classification to map built-up land cover at any location on Earth and at any point in time using Landsat 7 imagery.