Spatial and Temporal Mapping of the Evolution of the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)

Urbanization is a fundamental reality in the developed and developing countries
around the world creating large concentrations of the population centering on cities and
urban centers. Cities can offer many opportunities for those residing there, including
infrastructure, health services, rescue services and more. The living space density of
cities allows for the opportunity of more effective and environmentally friendly housing,
transportation and resources. Cities play a vital role in generating economic production
as entities by themselves and as a part of larger urban complex. The benefits can provide
for extraordinary amount of people, but only if proper planning and consideration is
undertaken.
Global urbanization is a progressive evolution, unique in spatial location while
consistent to an overall growth pattern and trend. Remotely sensing these patterns from
the last forty years of space borne satellites to understand how urbanization has
developed is important to understanding past growth as well as planning for the future. Imagery from the Landsat sensor program provides the temporal component, it
was the first satellite launched in 1972, providing appropriate spatial resolution needed to
cover a large metropolitan statistical area to monitor urban growth and change on a large
scale. This research maps the urban spatial and population growth over the Miami – Fort
Lauderdale – West Palm Beach Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) covering Miami-
Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties in Southeast Florida from 1974 to 2010 using
Landsat imagery. Supervised Maximum Likelihood classification was performed with a
combination of spectral and textural training fields employed in ERDAS Image 2014 to
classify the images into urban and non-urban areas. Dasymetric mapping of the
classification results were combined with census tract data then created a coherent
depiction of the Miami – Fort Lauderdale – West Palm Beach MSA. Static maps and
animated files were created from the final datasets for enhanced visualizations and
understanding of the MSA evolution from 60-meter resolution remotely sensed Landsat
images. The simplified methodology will create a database for urban planning and
population growth as well as future work in this area.