An Analytical Surveillance of Land Utilization and Expansion of Urban Areas Employing Remote Sensing Algorithms

Abstract In recent years, the city of AL-Hilla in Babylon, Iraq has suffered from the illegal fragmentation of agricultural and orchard lands, leading to their conversion into residential areas. This transformation has had a negative impact on the economic viability of plantation and vegetation lands, affecting the climate and causing an increase in temperatures, winds, and dust storms. This study aims to examine the spatio-temporal dynamics of changes in land-use/land-cover (LU/LC) using different spatial resolutions of satellite images to detect urban sprawl. The present study utilizes a supervised imagery classifier, employing the Mahalanobis distance (MD) technique to produce three distinct LU/LC maps for 2002, 2011, and 2022. The accuracy of the outcomes is assessed using a confusion matrix, and a comparison was made to compute the changes in land categories. The research reveals that the expansion of the urban region in AL-Hilla has significantly increased from 33.40 km² in 2002 to 89.16 km² in 2022, with an Annual Growth Rate of (6.74%) between 2002 and 2011 and 6.14% between 2011 and 2022. The growth in urban area now constitutes 38.45% of the entire city area and has resulted in a decline in other land categories such as water bodies, soil, and vegetation. The study highlights the necessity for effective management and planning strategies to address the adverse impact of urban expansion on the environment and agriculture