Assessing Impact of Land Use/Land Cover Dynamic on Urban Climate Change in a Semi-Arid Region – Case Study of Agadir City (Morocco)

Abstract

This research seeks to assess historically the urban expansion of Agadir city in Morocco within the 35-year timespan (1984-2019), and the influence of those changes on the regulating services of Agadir. It was achieved by applying Support Vector Machine supervised (SVM) algorithm on each Landsat products to derive Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) maps. High accuracy assessment values were obtained for all Landsat classified maps. Spectral radiance model was exploited successfully to highlight the spatiotemporal changes of thermal behavior of city surfaces. Terrestrial carbon dynamics of Agadir LULC was evaluated by applying a process-based carbon model. Outcomes of this paper revealed an important urban expansion within the 35-year timespan with an important loss of vegetation and bare land. This urban evolution impacts the Land Surface Temperature (LST) and caused carbon storage loss that contributes to local climate change. These findings could assist policy-makers to characterize a sustainable evolution of urban area, especially, to interpret how and where LULC changes might alter the dynamics of climate regulation and ecosystem services.