A diachronic analysis of the dynamic of two cities: Kisangani and Lubumbashi (Democratic Republic of Congo): How do the extension and/or of the densification of these cities impact the urban internal and peripheral ecosystems?

The dynamics of two cities between two years (2002 and 2010 for Kisangani; 2002 and 2008 for Lubumbashi, both part of the Democratic Republic of Congo) have been examined in order to estimate how their extension and/or of the densification have impacted the urban internal and peripheral ecosystems.
This study singularizes itself from the subjective ones by its quantified and objective approach based on landscape ecology. This discipline assumes that the landscape pattern description is important because, according to its central hypothesis called “pattern-process paradigm”, the ecological processes influence landscape structure and vice versa. Composition metrics, which are commonly used in landscape ecology, describe the pattern among other things in quantifying the presence and the number of patches from the various classes within the landscape.
For each city two SPOT 5 images were classified with a oriented-object supervised approach; then built area proportion index, a composition landscape metric, has been evaluated in order to 1) identify the extent of each area (urban, suburban, rural) within the urban-rural gradient, 2) quantify the dynamic of the different areas in the urban-rural gradient during the last decade and 3) quantify the effect of a decade of urban and suburban growth on ecosystems.
The similarities and differences between these cities, relevance and gaps in the method have then been identified and discussed.