Assessment of Spatial-Temporal Expansion of Built-up and Residential-Commercial Dwellings with Some Economic Implications: A Case Study in the Lower Hunter of Eastern Australia

Built-up areas have been expanding throughout the world. Monitoring and prediction of the build-up is not only important for the economic development but also acts as sentinels of environmental decline important for ecologically sustainable development of a region. The aim of this paper is to model the growth of built-up and residential-commercial dwellings over the recent past and thus predict the near future growth for a popular tourist destination of the Lower Hunter of New South Wales, Australia. The land use and land cover change analysis, based on classification of Landsat imageries from 1985 to 2005 at a 5-yearly interval, indicates that built-up areas increased steadily; it was 2.0% of the total landscape in 1985 but increased to 4.2% by the year 2005. If this trend continues, the built-up area will have grown to over 6.5% by 2025—which is equivalent to growth of over 325% from the 1985 base. In order to further evaluate the residential and commercial growth, orthorectified aerial photographs of nearby periods of 1985, 1995 and 2005 were utilized to manually delineate residential/commercial dwellings, and thereby dwelling densities were derived. The results indicate that the mean dwelling density has more than doubled within a decade.