Several developing countries in South/Southeast Asia are undergoing rapid urbanization with accompanying changes in land use and lifestyles both within towns and cities and in the rural areas that supply urban areas with food and other resources.

Over the next two decades, the combined urban population in China and India will grow by more than 700 million. China’s urban population is expected to increase by 400 million and India’s urban population will nearly double from today’s 350 million. Put into a global context, by 2030, nearly one-third of the world’s urban inhabitants will live in either China or India. The primary goal of this NASA LCLUC project was to quantify and understand the growth of urban clusters and the loss of agricultural land in these two rapidly urbanizing countries.

Across the globe, urban areas are rapidly expanding, and now the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. Peri-urbanization, a specific form of urbanization characterized by rapid and fragmented growth, is also increasing rapidly, especially in developing countries. By 2030, it is anticipated that peri-urban areas in East Asia will expand by 200 million people, or 40% of total projected urban population growth, making these areas one of the largest and most significant land cover changes in the region.

Cereal production has increased substantially in the last few decades in South Asia, primarily attributable to intensification rather than expansion of agricultural land area. Intensification has occurred through high-yielding seed varieties, irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide inputs. Moreover, intensification has largely been achieved through multiple cropping, i.e. increasing the number of crops per year from the same field. However, agricultural production is highly variable on an interannual basis and dependent on climate.

Rice is a major staple food for almost 50% of the human population in the world. Paddy rice fields, where rice plants are cultivated in flooded/inundated soils, are widely distributed across the globe, ranging from single paddy rice crop in a year (single cropping system) in temperate zone to triple paddy rice rice crops in a year in the moist tropic regions (triple cropping system).

This webinar presentation discussed remote sensing analyses carried out within the NASA grant on “Forest, agricultural, and urban transitions in Mainland Southeast Asia: Synthesizing knowledge and developing theory”. This research fulfils part of the grant objectives by mapping the expansion of tree crops for seven selected Landsat footprints in montane mainland Southeast Asia (MMSEA) (see Figure 1). Specifically we sought to map different tree crops (e.g. rubber, eucalyptus, and cashews); ascertain the date/period of change; and identify the land cover that preceded the change.