Monitoring of urban growth in the state of Hidalgo using Landsat images

Detection of urban growth through digital processing of satellite images provides valuable information for understanding the dynamics of change of land use and its spatial relationship with environmental factors. To apply or create effective policies for land use planning is essential to have a historical record of the regional distribution of human centers and in our country this kind of geographical database is practically null. Although Mexico has an update and complete mapping of land use, this poses great challenges. Within this issue, the Hidalgo state destines half of its territory to agricultural use, nonetheless, ranks fifth nationally in road infrastructure density. In the last decade, the current highway "Arco Norte" that crosses the southern state has promoted economic development in several neighboring municipalities and many of them were integrated into the Management Programme of the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico 2012. Given this background, this paper is focused on the generation of geographic information for regional urban planning and the overall aim is to examine urban growth rate during the period 2000-2014 in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico and identify potential areas of expansion from Landsat images. The methodology was based on techniques of remote sensing and Geographical Information System (GIS). The inputs used were six Landsat scenes: three for 2000 year and three for 2014. Image processing was performed on ERDAS Imagine® 9.1 and the spatial analysis of urban coverage statewide on ArcGIS 10.0 by ESRI®. First, the radiometric correction was made and we obtained the urban polygons of the 2000 year through of supervised classification. The 2014 urban layer was digitized manually due to the spectral incompatibility between the bands of the Landsat sensor 5 and 7, and the Landsat sensor 8. Then, we build a road density map and the spatial relationship of the urban centers with the road influence area was evaluated. For the year 2000, 103 urban polygons were mapped, whilst for 2014 were identified ten polygons more with a mapped minimum area of 24 ha. The main results indicated that in the state has increased 72.3 km2 urban area from 2000 to 2014. This represents an average growth rate of 1.8% per year. The most widespread municipalities are located in the region of Valle del Mezquital, however, Mineral de la Reforma, Tetepango, Tizayuca and Pachuca showed growth rates of 183.44%, 102% 94% and 68.5% in fourteen years, respect