Change in our MIDST: Toward detection and analysis of urban land dynamics in North and South America

Abstract

We describe a new approach to monitoring urban land dynamics-the MIDST (Multiple Indicators Detecting Significant Trends) system-that we are in the process of building. One of the main foci of the project are the megacities and major conurbations of both North and South America. Here we look at the result of a simple nonparametric trend analysis applied to a MODIS NBAR NDVI image time series of southeastern interior Brazil.