Use of remote sensing to study the impact of land-cover/land-use change on the environment: a Baltimore area, Maryland case study

Remote sensing was utilized, to analyze and study land-use/land-cover change impact on the environment of a section of Baltimore County and City. This study area was selected because it is one of the fastest growing regions in the state of Maryland. This growth (population and land-use activities) continues to exert immense pressure on both its resource and environment. Accordingly, a study was scoped to determine the magnitude of land-use/land-cover change, with special emphasis on transportation, and assess its impact on the local environment over the past ten years. The study utilized data sets obtained from several sources. Such data include remotely sensed imagery, land-use/land-cover maps, hydrology, and roads. The remote sensing data comprised mostly Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images acquired from the early 1990 to 1999 with varying temporal internals. The Environment for Visualizing Images (ENVI) was used to process and analyze the data on a Personal Computer (PC) environment. Five level-I land-use/land-cover categories (urban, vegetation, cultivated, mix (bare/built-Up), and Water) were analyzed for change in an attempt to reveal a general pattern and trend. Initial analysis of the TM images for 1990 and 1999 showed increase in the urban category and a decrease in the cultivated land. The final results from this study are expected to be beneficial to scientists, resource planners, managers, and policy makers.