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of Houston in the near future. The representative land use/land cover classes in this
selected region include residential area, commercial/industrial area, transportation,
woodland, grassland, and barren/soil.
The satellite Landsat MSS/TM images were collected from 1970s to 2010 in this
study. All these images were georeferenced to the Universal Transverse Mercator
projection using ENVI. The convention Maximum Likelihood Classification was
adopted to obtain four classified landscape maps with six landscape classes for each
map. We chose two set of samples around 600 pixels for training samples and test
samples, respectively. The selection of separate of training and test samples was
guided by the characteristic of each class at different years. The overall accuracy
assessment of classified maps was 92 % (1979), 94 % (1990), 96 % (2000), and
95 % (2010). Figure
12.2
shows the detailed proportion of each land use type as
shown in Table
12.2
.
In order to represent the rapid socioeconomic development in the Houston
area, four major socioeconomic variables were collected: population density, house
density, road density, and distance to highways (Van Vliet et al.
2012
; Aljoufie et al.
2013
). These four variables were collected at census block level from the official
website of the U.S. Census Bureau (US Census Bureau
2010
).
Fig. 12.2
Satellite images and classification results from MLC method on October 1979, Decem-
ber 1990, November 2000, and October 2010
Table 12.2
The proportion
of each land use type from
1979 to 2010 in Houston
Area (km
2
)
Houston
1979
1990
2000
2010
Residential
312.47
479.78
564.43
572.43
Industrial/commercial
93.50
228.58
198.21
197.07
Grassland
511.34
287.53
235.89
178.63
Woodland
209.68
140.32
184.70
179.43
Barren/soil
70.13
81.98
32.72
87.13
Wat er
31.73
9.67
11.85
13.11
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