Urban Expansion of Alabama Cities and Changing Environmental Dynamics

Urbanization plays a key role in modifying land cover and has widespread impact on the environment. Among the south-eastern states of USA, the state of Alabama as a whole shows negligible growth in terms of population, but individual cities within the state has been growing rapidly over past few decades. Up to now the focus of most urban studies has been Atlanta but little attention is given to cities in south-east, smaller than Atlanta yet growing at an alarming rate. Thus it is important to study the changing dynamics of individual cities and quantify their impacts. This study will focus on those ten cities of Alabama which have encountered greater than 25% population increase between 1980 and 2010.This study is important as urban influence on global, regional and local climate change is not well understood and only a few studies have been done on urbanization within Alabama. The objectives of this study is to 1) quantify the growth of Alabama cities using geospatial techniques (remote sensing and object-based classification) in conjunction with field validation and 2) determine any discernible and statistically-significant trends in precipitation, temperature profile, pollution in the study region (using statistical techniques). 3) project future growth scenarios for all the ten cities using a growth model and theoretically assessing the implications of such growth on the environment. The overarching objective will be to understand the dynamics of urban growth in Alabama and how it modifies the urban environment. The possible outcomes are 1) a better understanding of the complex dynamics of land use/land cover change and its impact on environmental parameters, 2) a future realistic climate modification scenarios for all study areas whose methodology can be duplicated in other cities around the globe as well. The outcomes of this research will set the stage for future growth projection of the cities, which can be used by scientific and planning community to implement adaptation and mitigation techniques to prevent greater loss due to adverse environmental impacts. Key words: Urbanization, Alabama, OBIA, land use land cover change, urban climate.