Abstract: Development and its expansion in dryland environments are experiencing climate warming and land-use/land cover change, impacting ecosystems and their sustainability and resiliency. Remote sensing (RS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technologies provide opportunities to analyze land use/ landcover (LULC) change trends at local to regional scales over the past few decades. This study applied RS and GIS techniques to identify and measure land-use/ land-cover change in the Middle Rio Grande River Basin. A novel classification process is applied to assess land use and land-cover change between 1994 and 2015 in the Middle Rio Grande Region (MRGR) on the US- Mexico border, between San Antonio, New Mexico and Presidio, Texas, and Ojinaga, Chihuahua, which includes the cities of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Results show that the native land cover has declined and is being replaced by urban development and agricultural expansion. Metropolitan areas across the region increased by 45 % from ~1.59 percent of the total study area in 1994 to more than 2.9 percent in 2015. The majority of expansion occurred around the major metropolitan areas of El Paso, Ciudad Juárez, and Las Cruces. Other land-use changes included a decrease in agricultural land cover and a loss of wetlands, possibly as a result of a reduction in streamflow. Possible impacts of these land-use/ land-cover changes on water resources include a shortage of water allocations for agriculture and ecosystems and the transfer of some water allocations to city land developers, as Hargrove et al. [1] demonstrated. Metropolitan planners, farmers, and other stakeholders will likely find the study valuable for planning water conservation measures, preparing for future water supply and treatment infrastructure growth, and monitoring groundwater availability and quality as urban populations grow.

Keywords: Development, Sustainability, Resiliency, Infrastructure, Land use, Land cover.

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