Analysis of Environmental Impacts in Urban Areas by Geospatial Data

The cumulative ecological impacts of land cover change in urban/periurban areas are very important for urban land cover planning decisions. In order to investigate the process of change and potential landscape configurations before permanent changes are made, spatial and temporal dynamics of land cover change scenarios and models are an increasingly valuable tool for examining future urban landscapes. Higher concentration of people in cities and their activities are exerting increasing pressure on the natural environment with consequences at urban, regional, continental and global levels. Due to urban development, in spite of improvements in air quality observed in Bucharest city after 1990, still concentrations of particulate matter PM and ground surface ozone, and other pollutants have not shown a significant decrease, these exceeding the recommendations of the World Health Organization. The influence of aerosol particles on climate, and how their properties are perturbed by anthropogenic activity, is one of the key uncertainties in climate change assessments. The study focuses on the assessment of environmental impacts of urban growth and pollution on Bucharest metropolitan area, Romania by satellite remote sensing and in-situ monitoring data. The application of fuzzy logic for quantifying magnitudes of urban land cover changes was used to identify anthropogenic changes that affects urban environment to various extents.