ABSTRACT
Earth-observing satellites have collected remote sensing data for more than 30 years, yet most urban mapping studies do not take full advantage of the historical record and the temporal frequency of the observations available. That information is ever more important as remote sensing images are increasingly being used with other types of data such as demographics, economics, and policy to understand the link between human activity and impacts on the landscape (Lo and Faber, 1997; Wang and Zhang, 2001; Schneider et al., 2005; Seto and Kaufmann, 2005). Linking social processes with spatial patterns observed in remote sensing has been the subject of numerous studies (Homewood et al., 2001; Lambin et al., 2000; Reid et al., 2000; Nagendra et al., 2004). Yet, it is almost without exception that the spatial patterns in these studies are observed in only two or three periods. The underlying assumption
is that the relationship between landscape dynamics and social processes can be understood with several observations in time. Although this may hold true for relatively slow land use and land cover changes, the assumption is not valid for rapidly urbanizing landscapes.
