Saad Saleem Bhatti

University of Ulster · Faculty of Life and Health Sciences

The quality of life (QOL) is a measure of social wellbeing and life satisfaction of individuals in an area. Measuring its spatial dynamics is of great significance as it can assist the policy makers and practitioners in improving the balance between urbanization and living environment. This study proposes an approach to spatially map and examine th...

Metropolitan regions worldwide are experiencing rapid urban growth and the planners often employ prediction models to forecast the future expansion for improving the land management policies and practices. These regions are a mix of urban, peri-urban and rural areas where each sector has its unique expansion properties. This study examines the diff...

The normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) has been useful for mapping urban built-up areas using Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) data. The applicability of this index to the newer Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) data was examined during this study, and a new method for built-up area extraction has been proposed. OLI imagery of urban area...

The recent drought (1998-2004) in water deficient province of Balochistan (the largest province of Pakistan) affected the availability of seasonal rainwater and vegetation cover. Analysis of the spatial rainfall computed through spatial interpolation of point rainfall depicted a reduction of about 53-85 percent and 66-90 percent in volumes of rainw...

Rising global temperatures are increasing the frequency and intensity of floods worldwide (Chang and Franczyk, 2008). Although efforts are being made to contain global warming to below 2°C rise, compared to the pre-industrial levels (1850–1900) and making an all-out effort to limit this increase to 1.5°C (UNFCC, 2015), it is still crucial to focus...

Climate change adaptation planning involves adjusting to the impacts of climate change and taking action to mitigate its adverse effects. Psychological distance, the separation between one's self-perception and actual events, can play a significant role in an individual's readiness to adapt to climate change impacts. This study aims to investigate...

The outbreak of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, which instigated governments to impose lockdowns across their countries. Amidst the lockdown in Pakistan, this study comprised measures of the COVID-19 risk perception, coping mechanism, and spatial variations. The data from 40 selected in...

Purpose Urban built-up has been increasing exponentially in the world. Urban population growth and migration are depleting the land resources and creating thermal discomfort. Cities all around the world are facing urban heat island effects and increased temperatures. This study aims to map land cover and formulate local climate zones for enhancing...

Rapid and unplanned urbanisation, together with climate change, are increasingly affecting the local climatic conditions of urban settlements. Spatiotemporal analysis using land use/land cover (LULC), land surface temperature (LST), and local climatic zone (LCZ) assessments have been helpful in understanding the urbanisation characteristics and mor...

Rapid and unplanned urbanization has resulted in the settlement and expansion of marginalized communities in flood-prone areas. Consequently, the devastating impacts of urban flooding have increased recently, further augmented by the changing climatic patterns resulting in more frequent flooding. However, to effectively enhance resilience at the co...

Capturing the dynamics of population change in urban areas necessitates access to geographically fine‐grained and temporally consistent data for several time points. Such data are generally not available and they must be created using standard population data which cannot usually be compared across time periods. In this paper, the focus is on chang...

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) emerged as a real threat to humans, drastically disrupting everyday life in 2020-21. Although the pandemic affected people from all walks of life, irrespective of age or gender, the way the risk is perceived varies from one person to another. The pandemic risk reduction strategies can only be effective if in...

Pakistan has faced frequent flash and riverine flooding in the recent decades. This study evaluates the effectiveness of flood EWS from the perspectives of local experts/institutions and communities. Interviews and consultations with the local experts (13 officials from government and other concerned departments) were carried out to understand the...

Rapid urbanization and climate change have increased flood risk in urban settings. Risk perception is a vital constituent of flood risk management and risk communication. It has become important to understand risk perception, so that appropriate disaster risk reduction strategies can be initiated. Socioeconomic factors influencing risk perception h...

Land transitions and related driving factors vary within a metropolitan region. Prediction accuracies rise by modeling urban and peri-urban areas independently. Proposed approach improves growth modeling performance in a metropolitan area.

Tropical cities aremore susceptible to the suggested fall outs fromprojected globalwarming scenarios as they are located in the Torrid Zone and growing at rapid rates. Therefore, research on the mitigation of urban heat island (UHI) effects in tropical cities has attainedmuch significance and increased immensely over recent years. TheUHI mitigation...

Knowledge-intensive businesses (KIBs) are one of the fastest developing subsectors that play an integral role in the world's economy; they have been outperforming the total economy in terms of economic and regional growth and job creation recently. The KIBs are usually driven by qualified and skilled workers capable of contributing to the creativit...

Spatial metrics are quantitative measures for evaluating the physical characteristics of geographical features, such as urban settlements and structures (Reis, 2015 ; Reis et al., 2015). Just like other quantitative methods of spatial analysis, spatial metrics have garnered a growing interest of international research during the past two decades (C...

The extraction of urban built-up areas is an important aspect of urban planning and understanding the complex drivers and biophysical mechanism of urban climate processes. However, built-up area extraction using Landsat data is a challenging task due to spatio-temporal dynamics and spatially intermixed nature of Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) in th...

Lahore is the second largest metropolitan area in Pakistan, and the capital city of Punjab province. The city hosts various historical monuments, buildings and gardens. A walled city during the Mughal era (1524–1752) and British colonial rule, the city has grown as a hub of commerce and trade in the region. The built-up area almost doubled from 199...

Socioeconomic and infrastructure development are the major sectors linked to prosperity of any region, while disparity in these sectors, in certain instances, hinder economic growth. This paper outlines an approach to examine development disparity in both spatial and temporal dimensions. A comparative analyses of socioeconomic and infrastructure de...

Infrastructure development relies on the allocation of resources which is usually uneven across cities. Socioeconomic instability stems from such development disparity that consequently affects the decision processes focusing on sustainable development. This study proposes an approach to examine the temporal dynamics of infrastructure development d...