Studying urban sprawland landscape change in matadepera (Barcelona Metropolitan Region)

In the last decades land-covers in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region have experienced a great transformation that has changed landscape structure and functioning. Agrarian area has decreased, forests have increased and urban area has sprawled. In this work we analyze the process of urban sprawl in wildland-urban interface areas and the perception of some inhabitants of the transformation of rural the landscape. We chose a suburban township of the BMR, to study locally several global environmental problems. By means of an integrative methodology we quantified and interpreted land-cover changes for the period 1956-2008. Wildland-Urban Interface, Land Cover and Land Use Change, Geographical Information Systems, oral sources, risk perception.