The trend is inescapable: more and more people in the developing world are living in the cities. By 2020, the number of people living in developing countries will grow from 4.9 billion to 6.8 billion. Ninety percent of this increase will be in rapidly expanding cities and towns. More than half the population of Africa and Asia will live in urban areas by 2020. More than three-quarters of Latin Americans already do.

Most agricultural output in the northeastern United States comes from counties that have experienced significant development. A mail survey, with 300 responses, was conducted in southeastern Pennsylvania to determine farmer adaptation to urbanization in this region. Despite development, traditional agriculture still predominates. Changes in land use were examined using multinomial logit models.

With continuing proliferation of human influences on landscapes, there is mounting incentive to undertake quantification of relationships between spatial patterns of human populations and vegetation. In considering such quantification, it is apparent that investigations must be conducted at different scales and in a comparative manner across regions. At the broader scales it becomes necessary to utilize remote sensing of vegetation for comparative studies against map referenced census data. This paper explores such an approach for the urbanized area in the Tokyo vicinity.