Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Urban Sprawl and Its Impact on Agricultural Land: A Case Study of the Jauharabad–Khushab Twin Cities, Pakistan (2000–2025)

Abstract

Rapid urbanization is a characteristic of the current land use change in developing nations, frequently at the cost of quality agricultural lands. The object of this research is the spatiotemporal dynamics of the urban sprawl phenomenon in Jauharabad-Khushab twin cities of Punjab, Pakistan during a time span of 25 years (2000 – 2025). The classification of Landsat satellite maps, reclassification using supervised classifiers and the assessment of the accuracy through confusion matrices allowed the quantification of the land use class transition. The results reveal a dramatic 384% increase in built-up area, from 5.1 km² in 2000 to 24.7 km² in 2025. Agricultural land-wise the losses were 56%, coverage of water bodies 275% and other land cover losses were 53%. The greatest periods of urbanization were in 2005–2010 and 2020–2025, which are related to housing societies and commercial corridors. Results of the overall classification was high with high accuracy (above 85%) and Kappa coefficient of 0.82. The results of this work reflect many urgent questions around the balance of urban development and food security and clearly point to the need for sustainable land use planning.