Evaluation of driving forces of land-use change and urban growth in North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany)

The German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has experienced considerable land-use changes during the last decades. One key element of these changes is the increase in impervious surface that is driven by factors like suburbanization, extension of urban infrastructure, development of new industrial and commercial areas, village expansion, etc. The changes in the land-use have been detected with Landsat satellite data for a time period covering the last 30 years. For 4 steps (1975, 1984, 2001, and 2005) specific land-use maps have been generated. In this study we concentrated only on the increase in impervious areas, although other forms of land-use change clearly also appeared in the study area. To measure driving forces of urban sprawl in NRW logistic regression models have been developed in the spatial domain. Therefore probability maps were generated for the land-use configuration in 1984 and for the increase in impervious surface for the time span 1984-2001. For the initial land-use configuration in 1984 a statistical relationship between biogeophysical conditions, distance measures, and the appearance of impervious area could be established, while it was difficult to predict exact locations of urban sprawl between 1984 and 2001 with the explanatory factors used in this study. The statistical models were tested with the relative operating characteristic (ROC) as a measure for the goodness of fit.