Chapter 13 Evaluating the Ecological and Environmental Impact of Urbanization in the Greater Toronto Area through Multi-Temporal Remotely Sensed Data and Landscape Ecological Measures Dongmei Chen, Wenbao Liu, Jie Tian, and Peter Luciani Abstract Urbanization is a critical factor affecting the ecological and environmental balance of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), the most popu- lous metropolitan area in Canada, in the past three decades. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between landscape change and population increase patterns as well as to evaluate ecological impacts of urbanization in the GTA. Multi-temporal remotely sensed data have been used to derive vegetation changes from 1992 to 2003. Land use change is derived from historical land use maps. Five landscape fragmentation indices are calculated for different periods using FRAGSTATS software. Population change is compared with land use and vegetation changes. The landscape fragmentation rate is then compared with the population growth rate. Our results show that the mean normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is negatively correlated with the percentage of the urban settlement land and population density at the census tract (CT) level. Changes in the percentage of urban land use show relatively weak correla- tions with the five fragmentation indices. It was found that shape and fractal dimension indices are better at characterizing the urbanization process than the indices of diversity, contagion, and percentage of like adjacencies. Keywords Urbanization Á Landscape analysis Á Remote sensing Á Fragmentation Á Environmental change 13.1 Introduction Urbanization is a critical factor affecting the ecological balance of the earth system. One of the greatest challenges is to understand the impact of urban systems that evolve over time and space, as the outcome of the interaction between human behaviors and bio-physical processes. A wide variety of D. Chen (*) Department of Geography, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada e-mail: chendm@queensu.ca B. Jiang, X. Yao (eds.), Geospatial Analysis and Modelling of Urban Structure and Dynamics, GeoJournal Library 99, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-8572-6_13, Ó Springer ScienceþBusiness Media B.V. 2010 251