Land Use Dynamics Using Google Earth Engine

(Case Study: Padang City, West Sumatra Province)

Abstract

Land use change is a critical issue in rapidly developing cities, driven by population growth and urban expansion. This study analyzes land use dynamics in Padang City, West Sumatera, using Sentinel-2 imagery from 2020-2022, and 2024 processed on the Google Earth Engine platform. The Random Forest supervised classification method was applied to identify six major land use categories: water bodies, forest, open land, settlement, rice fields, and shrubs. The results show a consistent decline in forest and rice fields, while open land and settlement expanded significantly due to urbanization. Between 2020 and 2022, large areas of forest were converted into shrubs, and rice fields were transformed into residential zones. Although the rate of change slowed during 2022-2024, forest degradation and agricultural land conversion persisted. The overall classification accuracy exceeded 99%. Confirming the reliability of the approach. These finding demonstrate the effectiveness of Google Earth Engine for spatio-temporal monitoring and provide valuable insight for sustainable spatial planning in rapidly growing regions.