Worldwide expansion of urban and residential areas has led to conversion of natural ecosystem and agriculture land to built-up areas. The aim of this paper was to model the growth of built-up and commercial-residential dwellings over the recent past and thereby predict the near future for a popular tourist destination of the Lower Hunter region of New South Wales, Australia.

The land cover change analysis of the region utilizing classified Landsat imageries from 1985 to 2005 at a 5-yearly interval indicated that built-up area has been increasing steadily from 2.0%, 2.4%, 2.8%, 3.8% and 4.2% of the total area by 1985, 1991, 1995, 2000 and 2005 respectively. If this trend continues, the built-up will have grown to over 6.5% by 2025- which is equivalent to growth of over 325% of the 1985 built-up. Distance to built-up of 1985, distance to transport lines, land cover of 1985 and DEM were used to derive transition potential thereafter to predict built-up for the year 2025.

In order to further evaluate the residential-commercial growth, orthorectified aerial photographs of nearby period of 1985, 1995 and 2005 were utilized to manually delineate dwellings. Dwelling densities were derived using a moving window of 500 X 500m, to elucidate the spatial-temporal patterns. Mean dwelling density was found to almost double in a decade; it was 2.8 units/sq. km in 1985 increasing to 5.3 in 1995 and 10.0 in 2005. The higher density areas were constantly rising at the expense of the lower density areas, especially in later years.