Exploratory analysis of suburban land cover and population density in the U.S.A

The objective of this paper is to investigate the consistency of "suburban" settlement patterns and land covers. We analyzed population density, extracted from the census, and vegetation abundance, derived from Landsat imagery, taking six cities in the U.S.A. as contrasting examples. Combining population density and areal vegetation abundance estimates yields univariate and bivariate distributions for the two variables. We quantify the relationship between population density and vegetation fraction in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix and Seattle. A bimodal distribution of population density in the U.S.A. suggests that it is possible to characterize "suburban" on the basis of population density between 100 and 10,000 people/km². The maximum areal vegetation cover diminishes linearly with the log₁₀ of the population density in cities with large density ranges