Impacts of Urban Sprawl on Urban Heat Intensity in East Baton Rouge Parish: A Remote Sensing Assessment

Urban expansion in East Baton Rouge Parish (EBRP) increasingly replaces vegetated, permeable land with heat-absorbing rooftops and pavements, reducing evapotranspiration and elevating land-surface temperatures (LST). This study quantifies how low-density, land-consumptive growth patterns amplify urban heat intensity (UHI) and frames that thermal signal as an indicator of land degradation relevant to planning and public health. We integrate multi-temporal USGS Landsat 8/9 Collection 2 Level-2 LST with vegetation metrics (NDVI, SAVI from Landsat/Sentinel-2) and a built-up proxy (NDBI/impervious fraction from land-cover products and local GIS) to map sprawl-related thermal hot spots, model relationships among imperviousness, vegetation condition, and LST, and summarize results to policy-relevant units (census tracts, corridors, and development fronts). Cloud and quality masking are applied, seasonal composites are generated for warm periods, and ΔLST is computed between urbanized pixels and nearby reference areas. We use robust trend estimation and spatial diagnostics (e.g., local clustering) to highlight persistent hot spots along major arterials, large parking complexes, and recently urbanized edges where vegetation loss and soil sealing co-occur. Findings show a consistent, spatially coherent coupling: higher imperviousness and lower vegetation indices align with higher LST, producing durable heat hot spots in spread-out, shade-poor districts. To support action, we propose a simple Heat & Degradation Index that blends ΔLST, % impervious, and vegetation change to prioritize cooling interventions, cool roofs and pavements, permeable retrofits, roadside green infrastructure, and parking-lot greening, with emphasis on corridors and neighborhoods exhibiting the most substantial thermal penalties. The workflow is transparent, reproducible with open data, and designed to be updated as new imagery and permitting records become available. By linking sprawl to thermal stress at decision scales, this work offers EBRP a practical, evidence-based path to monitor land degradation and target equitable cooling investments as the region grows.