Paper Title
Urban Expansion Assessment of Constantine Metropolitan Area using Landsat Remote Sensing Combined with Landscapes Metrics

Abstract
The metropolitan area of Constantine is undergoing a rapid urban expansion that is manifesting itself in significant changes in land use and occupation. The aim of this study is to analyse these changes through a diachronic approach within the limits of the current administrative division of the metropolitan area of Constantine. To do this, we used Landsat satellite imagery (spatial scenes) over a time series of three punctuated decades (1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020) to detect the topology, rate and process of change in land use and land cover. This approach allowed us to elaborate in a first step eight thematic maps showing unchanged and converted land use classes. These results were obtained after the acquisition and processing of "multi-spectral band raster" satellite images on the geographic information system © QGIS (V3.10.13) and more particularly its semi-automatic supervised classification process © SCP (V7.8.10) to end up with a quantification of land use and land cover change (LULC) in the form of thematic maps integrating the metadata. The change observed is essentially characterised by a net increase in the urban area, i.e. 12,550 hectares in 2020 compared with 8,088 hectares in 1990, and therefore an increase of more than 57.55%, of which it is believed that more than half of this growth was achieved during the decade (2010-2020), which finally gives an average growth rate equivalent to 148.73 hectares per year. However, the quantification of the modes and processes of this change is less easy to demonstrate without the use of spatial metrics, which consists of a factorial analysis of the maps obtained to obtain verifiable indices according to empirical references. The modelling of the maps for the landscape metric assessment was carried out on the © FRAGSTATS software package (V4.2). The correlation and cross-checking of the indices resulting from the modelling enabled us to distinguish three modes of spatial aggregation of change, the first is contiguous and homogeneous to the summit conurbation (Constantine), the second is in fragmented extension of the main conurbation and its satellite towns and the last is in peri-urban extension bordering on, but fragmented in relation to, the urban limits of the conurbations constituting the macro-form of the metropolitan area. The results of this study can be used as a decision-making aid for future urban programming or projection operations capable of formulating urbanisation schemes that are more sustainable and adaptable to the requirements of metropolitan status. Keywords - Land use and Land Cover Change, Urban Expansion, Remote Sensing, Landscapes Metrics, and Metropole of Constantine.