Cellular Automata models are used for simulating spatial distributions and Markov Chain models are used for simulating temporal changes. The main aim of this study is to investigate the effect of urban growth on Faisalabad. This research is aimed at predicting seasonal Land-Surface-Temperature (LST) as well as Land-Use and Land-cover (LULC) with a Cellular-Automata-Markov-Chain (CA-Markov-Chain). Landsat 5, 7 and 8 data were used for mapping seasonal LULC and LST distributions during the months of May and November for the years 1990, 1998, 2004, 2008, 2013 and 2018. A CA-Markov-Chain was developed for simulating long-term landscape changes at 10-year time steps from 2018 to 2048. Furthermore, surface temperature during summers and winters were predicted well by Urban Index (UI), a non-vegetation index, demonstrating the highest correlation of R² = 0.8962 and R² = 0.9212 with respect to retrieved summer and winter surface temperature. Through the CA-Markov Chain analysis, we can expect that high density and low-density residential areas will grow from 22.23 to 24.52 km² and from 108.53 to 122.61 km² in 2018 and 2048, as inferred from the changes occurred from 1990 to 2018. Considering UI as the predictor of seasonal LST, we predicted that the summer and winter temperature 24–28 °C and 14–16 °C and regions would decrease in coverage from 10.75 to 3.14% and from 8.81 to 3.47% between 2018 and 2048, while the summer and winter temperature 35–42 °C and winter 26–32 °C regions will increase in the proportion covered from 12.69 to 24.17% and 6.75–15.15% of city.

Wetlands provide vital ecological and socioeconomic services but face escalating pressures worldwide. This study undertakes an integrated spatiotemporal assessment of the multifaceted vulnerabilities shaping Khinjhir Lake, an ecologically significant wetland ecosystem in Pakistan, using advanced geospatial and machine learning techniques. Multi-temporal optical remote sensing data from 2000 to 2020 was analyzed through spectral water indices, land cover classification, change detection and risk mapping to examine moisture variability, land cover modifications, area changes and proximity-based threats over two decades. The random forest algorithm attained the highest accuracy (89.5%) for land cover classification based on rigorous k-fold cross-validation, with a training accuracy of 91.2% and a testing accuracy of 87.3%. This demonstrates the model’s effectiveness and robustness for wetland vulnerability modeling in the study area, showing 11% shrinkage in open water bodies since 2000. Inventory risk zoning revealed 30% of present-day wetland areas under moderate to high vulnerability. The cellular automata–Markov (CA–Markov) model predicted continued long-term declines driven by swelling anthropogenic pressures like the 29 million population growth surrounding Khinjhir Lake. The research demonstrates the effectiveness of integrating satellite data analytics, machine learning algorithms and spatial modeling to generate actionable insights into wetland vulnerability to guide conservation planning. The findings provide a robust baseline to inform policies aimed at ensuring the health and sustainable management and conservation of Khinjhir Lake wetlands in the face of escalating human and climatic pressures that threaten the ecological health and functioning of these vital ecosystems.

Cities are complex and dynamic entities in close proximity of people, implying multi temporal observations to analyse and understand the urban context. At present, open-source data and geospatial intelligence are becoming the important means of exploring, monitoring and predicting urban status of area growth and population increase. In last few decades, unemployment and absence of infrastructures in the rural areas promoted the unplanned and haphazard urbanization across the urban centres in Pakistan. This study focuses on exploring the potential of open-source/freely available datasets for city mapping and monitoring spatially. The study gives a spatial perspective of rapidly growing cities of Pakistan using Google Earth Engine to classify Landsat images over last four decades, and discovers sprawl patterns across cities. The study works out that the built-up area is significantly increasing with population growth over four decades and there is a strong positive correlation between population growth and built-up expansion. Using Open-Source Data (Landsat images and LandScan data), this study has offered a technical solution of Google Earth Engine-supported analysis of statistics and machine learning to spatially monitoring the population change and urban growth of four major Pakistan cities. It is undoubted that our working results will provide the timely and cost-effective information to policymakers, Govt Officials and citizens for more sustainable urbanization.

Big data have 4V characteristics of volume, variety, velocity, and veracity, which authentically calls for big data analytics. However, what are the dominant characteristics of big data analysis? Here, the analytics is related to the entire methodology rather than the individual specific analysis. In this paper, six techniques concerning big data analytics are proposed, which include: (1) Ensemble analysis related to a large volume of data, (2) Association analysis related to unknown data sampling, (3) High-dimensional analysis related to a variety of data, (4) Deep analysis related to the veracity of data, (5) Precision analysis related to the veracity of data, and (6) Divide-and-conquer analysis related to the velocity of data. The essential of big data analytics is the structural analysis of big data in an optimal criterion of physics, computation, and human cognition. Fundamentally, two theoretical challenges, ie the violation of independent and identical distribution, and the extension of general set-theory, are posed. In particular, we have illustrated three kinds of association in geographical big data, ie geometrical associations in space and time, spatiotemporal correlations in statistics, and space-time relations in semantics. Furthermore, we have illustrated three kinds of spatiotemporal data analysis, ie measurement (observation) adjustment of geometrical quantities, human spatial behavior analysis with trajectories, data assimilation of physical models and various observations, from which spatiotemporal big data analysis may be largely derived.

The objective of this study is to adopt a methodology for analysing spatial patterns of danger of forest fire at Margalla Hills, Islamabad, Pakistan. The work is concentrated on burnt areas using Landsat data and to classify forest fire severity with different parameters (climatic, vegetation, topography and human activities). In addition to these four variables, the extent of the burned areas was measured. Statistical analysis at each fire scene was used to measure the effect on the variables. To calculate the fire severity ratio correlated to each variable, logistic and stepwise regressions were used. The results showed that the burned areas have increased at a rate of 25.848 ha/day (R² = 0.98) if the number of total days since the start of fire has increased. As a result, forest density, distance to roads, average quarterly maximum temperature and average quarterly mean wind speed were highly correlated with the fire severity. Only average quarterly maximum temperature and forest density affected the size of the burnt areas. Prediction maps indicate that 53% of forests are in the very low severity level (0.25–0.45), 25% in the low level (0.45–0.65) and 22% in high and very high levels (>0.65).

Rivers play an essential role to humans and ecosystems, but they also burst their banks during floods, often causing extensive damage to crop, property, and loss of lives. This paper characterizes the 2014 flood of the Indus River in Pakistan using the US Army Corps of Engineers Hydrologic Engineering Centre River Analysis System (HEC-RAS) model, integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) and satellite images from Landsat-8. The model is used to estimate the spatial extent of the flood and assess the damage that it caused by examining changes to the different land-use/land-cover (LULC) types of the river basin. Extreme flows for different return periods were estimated using a flood frequency analysis using a log-Pearson III distribution, which the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) test identified as the best distribution to characterize the flow regime of the Indus River at Taunsa Barrage. The output of the flood frequency analysis was then incorporated into the HEC-RAS model to determine the spatial extent of the 2014 flood, with the accuracy of this modelling approach assessed using images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The results show that a supervised classification of the Landsat images was able to identify the LULC types of the study region with a high degree of accuracy, and that the most affected LULC was crop/agricultural land, of which 50% was affected by the 2014 flood. Finally, the hydraulic simulation of extent of the 2014 flood was found to visually compare very well with the MODIS image, and the surface area of floods of different return periods was calculated. This paper provides further evidence of the benefit of using a hydrological model and satellite images for flood mapping and for flood damage assessment to inform the development of risk mitigation strategies.