ASSESSMENT OF URBAN SPATIAL EXPANSION WITH ADVANCED MULTI-CRITERIA GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION SYSTEM AND REMOTE SENSING TECHNIQUE: THE CASE OF OUJDAH AND SAIDIAH CITYIES IN MOROCC

Abstract

Nowadays, both GIS and RS satellite images are becoming important decision-making tools that allow the investigation and monitoring of urban growth according to a set of specified criteria and RS data. The present study is an assessment of the trend in urban growth observed in the Oujda city urban agglomeration, the Saidia coastal zone, and the South-eastern part of Morocco. A huge set of satellite images, databases, and ancillary dates have been collected, analyzed, processed, and integrated for the area under investigation. Several methodologies were exploited by using the IKONOS and SPOT images from August 2007 as well as Landsat TM and ETM acquired between the year 1984 up to 2011 covering the whole Oujda city. The obtained results present that supervised classification resulting from integrated SPOT and ETM datasets produce very great results in comparison to maximum supervised classification methods. Also, PCA was more efficient in comparison with NDVI concerning delineating urban growth without much effort. On the other side, IKONOS, SPOT detail imagery, produced higher accuracy results compared with the results of Landsat Imagery. Its increase shows that changes did take place, but most changes took place in the urban zones, bare lands, and irrigated ones. It has increased from 711.22 hectares in 1970 to 3,664.03 hectares in 2009, while the others were just a standard modification. Meanwhile, Saidia city's urban area increased from 6.5 hectares in 1988 to 28.7 hectares in 2002.