Land use/cover conversion between classes can be useful to
indicate the nature of land changes. We adopted a two-way crosstabulation
or matrix analysis to characterize the conversions from
different land use/cover categories to the three urban classes. The
matrix analysis produces a thematic layer that contains a separate
class for every possible conversion between classes in two layers.
As mentioned before, this study focused on the changes of the three
urban land use classes, and therefore, the total possible combinations
are grouped into 15 conversion types as shown in Table 6. The C1e-C12 categories in Table 6 consist of the conversion from forest,
agricultural, grass/shrub, and fallow/barren land to the three urban
classes. The C13 and C14 categories denote the changes of a few
vegetation classes especially forest land. Note that the C0 category
includes all the unchanged pixels (approximately 74% of the landscape)
and other combinations that are not considered here. The
spatial characteristics of land conversions are illustrated in Fig. 6.