USGS Contributions to the Climate Change Science Program

Metropolitan areas in the United States are growing at unprecedented rates, creating extensive urban landscapes. Many of the farmlands, wetlands, forests, and deserts that formed the America of 1900 have been transformed during the past 100 years into human settlements. Almost everyone has seen these changes to their local environment but without a clear understanding of their impacts. It is not until we study these landscapes from a spatial perspective and the time scale of decades that we can begin to measure the changes that have occurred and predict the impact of changes to come. The Urban Dynamics project analyzes land-use change in urban environments in order to provide a historical perspective of land-use change and an assessment of the spatial patterns, rates, correlation, trends, and impacts of that change. This project develops and refines methods for land-use reconstruction, geographic analysis, modeling, prediction, monitoring, and impacts assessment.