TITLE:
The Use of GIS, Remote Sensing and Shannon’s Entropy Statistical Techniques to Analyze and Monitor the Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Urbanization and Sprawl in Zarqa City, Jordan
AUTHORS:
Atef F. Al Mashagbah
KEYWORDS:
Landsat, Shannon Entropy, GIS, Remote Sensing, Urban Expansion, Urban Sprawl, Land Use/Cover, Zarqa, Jordan
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.8 No.2,
April
29,
2016
ABSTRACT: The aim of this study is
to understand and quantify the urban growth and trend in Zarqa city during the
period 1990 to 2014 and to produce land use and cover map for the studied area
through the use of the GIS and remote sensing techniques with Shannon’s Entropy
statistical method. For this purpose, three Landsat images were used for land
use classification by using supervised maximum likelihood classification
techniques to extract and assess the changes of urban lands. The results
indicated that the urban areas in Zarqa city increased by 22.15% in the period
from 1990 to 2005 and 14.86% from 2005 to 2014, with a rate of expansion of
0.96 and by 1.31 km2/ year for the two time periods respectively.
The entropy value increased from 1.20 in the first period to 1.38 in the
second, while the entropy value for the NE, NW, SE and SW zones showed high
values, which confirmed that urban expansion and sprawling had existed in the
past twenty four years in the study area. Urban expansion and sprawl cause
different impacts on the natural, economic, and aesthetic aspects of the city
which lead and guide government officials and planners to understand and
monitor current growth and visualize future growth.