Exurban Development: Mapping, Locating Factors, and Ecological Impact Analysis using GIS and Remote Sensing

Anthropogenic disturbance in a landscape can take various forms, including residential development, which has substantial impact on the world’s ecosystems. Exurban development, characterized by low density residential development outside urban areas, was and continues to be one of the fastest growing forms of residential development in North America. It has disproportionately large ecological impacts relative to its footprint, yet is mostly overlooked in scientific studies. Specifically, a lack of spatially explicit (disaggregate) data on exurban development at regional level has contributed to a very limited understanding of this interspersed low density development. The main goal of this dissertation is to provide an increased understanding of exurban development in terms of its location, locating factors, and conservation and ecological implications at regional level, especially to enable incorporation of exurban information in the decision making processes. For this I asked four specific questions in this dissertation: (i) Where exactly is exurban development? (ii) What are the most likely factors that influence exurban development location? (iii) How does current and future development conflict with conservation goals? And (iv) What is the extent of the exurban development’s ecological impacts? Using a heterogeneous landscape, the County of Peterborough (Ontario, Canada), as the case study this dissertation undertook a number of separate yet related analyses that collectively provided the improved understanding of exurban development. The investigation of traditionally used surrogates for development, like roads and census data, and a more direct remote sensing method, using moderate resolution SPOT/HRVIR imagery, provided insights and contributed to development of spatially explicit data on exurban development. The evaluation of several commonly hypothesized locating factors in relation to exurban development revealed some of the major influences on the location of this development, especially in the context of Ontario. This research contributed to our understanding of the future risks of land conversion and identification of potential conflict areas between development and conservation plans in the study area. Lastly, examining the ecological impact of exurban development including associated roads, in terms of functions such as barrier effects and landscape connectivity, highlighted the importance of these seldom included anthropogenic disturbances in land and conservation planning. The contributions of this research to the existing body of knowledge are threefold. First, this dissertation reveals the limitations associated with existing methods used to map exurban development and presents a relatively easy, effective, automated and operational method to delineate exurban built areas at regional level using GIS and remote sensing. Second, the analyses conducted in this dissertation repeatedly highlights the importance of incorporating fine level details on exurban development in land and conservation planning as well as ecological impact assessments and presents methods and tools that can systematically and scientifically integrate this information in decision making framework. Third, this study conducted one of a kind, comprehensive and spatially explicit study on exurban development in Canada, where there is near absence of such research. With the rarely available exurban built footprint data delineated for the study area, this study not only identified the potential locating factors, future conversion risk, and conflict areas between development and conservation plans, but also quantified ecological impact in terms of landscape function, namely barrier effects and landscape connectivity, using a relatively novel circuit theoretic approach that can directly inform land and conservation decision planning process.

Keywords: Exurban
Remote Sensing
GIS
SPOT 5
Dasymetric
Land use model
Landscape connectivity
NDVI
Advisor: Conway, Tenley