Assessing the Impact of Urbanization on Land Use and Land Temperature in Lahore: An Empirical Analysis Using GIS Mapping

Abstract

The objective of this research is to examine the influences of changing land use and land cover on the land surface temperature (LST) of the Lahore metropolitan area. The study region is a rapidly urbanizing city in Pakistan, where land development has accelerated dramatically during the last 30 years. The satellite images acquired by LSAT-5 (TM) and LSAT-8 (OLI) are used to calculate land temperature and its various features. They are processed in the software named ERDAS imagine-14 and supervised classification is performed to calculate the area covered by major land features. The Persistence Matrix, a GIS analysis, is used to see if the Lahore urban area is developing at the expense of agricultural land over time. The results demonstrate that over the research period, urbanization accelerated in tandem with the loss of agricultural land. The ARDL model's findings suggest that Lahore's rapid urbanization has a significantly positive link with land surface temperature (LST), while cultivation area has an inverse relationship with land surface temperature (LST).