Urban Expansion and the Loss of Prairie and Agricultural Lands: A Satellite Remote-Sensing-Based Analysis at a Sub-Watershed Scale

Abstract

Prairies or grasslands together with areas designated as agricultural lands are one of the largest types of land cover and land use that exist today. While prairies provide habitat to a wide variety of animals and organisms, and agricultural lands support human populations, these lands, especially those in the immediate vicinities of large urban areas, are giving way to urbanization at alarming rates. In particular, prairies are often viewed as wastelands because their benefit to the effective functioning of the urban ecosystem is often not fully understood. On the other hand, many agricultural lands are being converted for several urban uses because of the high economic returns from their sale. In this study, we classified SPOT (Satellite Pour l’Observation de la Terre) satellite data of the study area using the supervised maximum likelihood classification approach in order to investigate the loss of prairies and agricultural lands due to urban expansion in six sub-watersheds in the Kansas City metropolitan area of the States of Kansas and Missouri in the U.S. Based on the classified maps, we computed the magnitude and rate of urban expansion, and the proportion of loss in prairies and agricultural lands that was a result of urban expansion. Results from the 22-year study revealed that in all six sub-watersheds, agricultural lands and grassland were depleted at alarming rates with no sustainable effort to conserve them. These results provide baseline information that can support a data-driven and sustainable path for urban expansion in the examined sub-watersheds.