After a brief discussion in class pertaining to Urban Sprawl, I decided I wanted to do a little more research on the subject. After a brief web surfing session I found an interesting article on Nasa's web page about urban sprawl and how NASA and other private companies are helping local planers. You can find the article by clicking here. As one can see in the picture below, urban sprawl can be quite drastic in many areas. While the Baltimore area grew over 200 years, there are many other clear cases of similar sprawl that occurred over an even shorter time period.
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| Map of urban sprawl around Baltimore, Maryland over 200 years courtesy of USGS. |
What is interesting about the historical imaging that we have access to is that it can be used in future urban and transportation planning. The problem used to be that there was no way for local planners to get all this information and properly analyse it. But now there is a program through UConn called Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO). This program can take past and current urban data to predict various urban sprawling scenarios to help urban planners plan for the future in a more sustainable way.
NEMO is just one f many different programs that uses historical data as well as actual areal imagery to help planners see how urban sprawl is affecting areas in categories such as population density, forest fragmentation and percentage of impervious surfaces.
How else do you think aerial images could help the transportation sector?
Did your research go in to any detail about heat maps being used to detect highly populated areas around large cities? I think that would be interesting to compare to the map you have on this post that increases throughout the years.
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