School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-1-2026
Abstract
Rapid and unplanned urbanization has significantly transformed land use/land cover (LULC), contributing to increased land surface temperature (LST) and the emergence of urban heat islands (UHIs), especially in ecologically fragile regions. This study focuses on the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh, assessing LULC changes, LST dynamics, and UHI expansion from 1994 to 2024 using Landsat satellite imagery, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference water index (NDWI) indices, and field-based LST validation. Unsupervised classification reveals a 191.75% increase in settlement areas and a 25.65% loss in forest cover. Correspondingly, the highest LST zones (> 30 °C) were absent in 1994 but expanded to over 19,000 ha by 2024, while the coolest class (< 20 °C) nearly disappeared. Ground-truthing at 100 points yielded a high validation accuracy (overall 89%, Kappa = 0.86), and the correlation between field and satellite-derived LST values showed a strong coefficient of determination (R² = 0.80). Pearson correlation analysis indicated that built-up and agricultural areas are strongly positively correlated with higher LST classes (r = + 0.92 to + 0.98), whereas forested regions and water bodies exhibit strong negative correlations (r = − 0.89 to − 1.00). These results highlight a clear association between anthropogenic land transformation and thermal intensification. This study not only offers a spatiotemporal understanding of thermal landscape shifts in Sylhet Division but also provides a robust remote sensing-ground validation framework for urban heat risk assessment. The findings can inform climate-sensitive planning, green space restoration, and sustainable land-use strategies in rapidly urbanizing tropical regions.
Recommended Citation
Joy, Md Fazle Rabbi, Md Abdur Rahim, Md Mahfuzar Rahman, Sumiaya Amin Preota, and Mohammed Mahathee Hossain. "Evaluating the transformation of land cover, land surface temperature, and urban heat island in Sylhet Division through geospatial analysis." Discover Geoscience 4, no. 1 (2026): 306. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44288-026-00687-z
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Publication Title
Discover Geoscience
DOI
10.1007/s44288-026-00687-z
Comments
© The Author(s) 2026. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licens es/by-nc-nd/4.0/