Spatio-Temporal Urban Growth Pattern in the Arctic: A Case Study in Surgut, Russia

A spatial-temporal analysis has become an essential approach for tracking the trend of changes in land use and land cover pattern especially in the context of urbanization. This paper presents the urban land use change over time of an Arctic pioneer town, Surgut (Russia). This town unfolds during the soviet era, embedded with oil production, and grew up to become the country oil capital. Surgut is nowadays one of the healthier Russian Arctic towns and has always been attractive even during the severe decrease in population of the Russian Arctic zone over the decade of the USSR collapse. Various multi-temporal satellite imageries (1973-2018) were used to generate the map and analyze the urban expansion, land transformation, and growth directions in order to understand the nature of built-up growth in a soviet Arctic city and its post-soviet evolution.