Tony Wu

Ontario’s Greenbelt surrounds the Golden Horseshoe Area (GHA) in Southern Ontario, Canada. The purpose of the Greenbelt is to protect key environmentally sensitive land and farmland from urban development and sprawl. The importance of this land was officially recognized in the Bill 135 (Greenbelt Act) and Bill 136 (Places to Grow Act) passed on February 2005 by the Ontario provincial government. The GHA is the fourth fastest growing urban region in North America and accounts for over 20 per cent of Canada’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). With rapid population increase in the GHA, there is tremendous pressure on municipalities to expand development into the Greenbelt. This research is focused on the detection of land cover change within the Greenbelt with the use of remote sensing and Geographic Information System (GIS). The image time series data selected for this project consists of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper plus (ETM+); spanning a twenty year period from 1985 to 2005. Various image differencing techniques, Texture Analysis (TA), the Tasselled Cap Transformation (TCT), Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) were used in unsupervised image classification with an overall classification accuracy of 89.33 percent in 1999 and 90.67 percent in 2005. Change detection results indicated an increase of urban land area from 1985 to 2005 and a steady decrease in agricultural land use area from 1985 to 2005.