Assessing Riyadh’s Urban Change Utilizing High-Resolution Imagery

The implications of change on local processes have attracted significant research interest in recent times. In urban settings, green spaces and forests have attracted much attention. Here, we present an assessment of change within the predominantly desert Middle Eastern city of Riyadh, an understudied setting. We utilized high-resolution SPOT 5 data and two classification techniques—maximum likelihood classification and object-oriented classification—to study the changes in Riyadh between 2004 and 2014. Imagery classification was completed with training data obtained from the SPOT 5 dataset, and an accuracy assessment was completed through a combination of field surveys and an application developed in ESRI Survey 123 tool. The Survey 123 tool allowed residents of Riyadh to present their views on land cover for the 2004 and 2014 imagery. Our analysis showed that soil or ‘desert’ areas were converted to roads and buildings to accommodate for Riyadh’s rapidly growing population. The object-oriented classifier provided higher overall accuracy than the maximum likelihood classifier (74.71% and 73.79% vs. 92.36% and 90.77% for 2004 and 2014). Our work provides insights into the changes within a desert environment and establishes a foundation for understanding change in this understudied setting.