Eco-Environmental Quality Assessment in China’s 35 Major Cities Based On Remote Sensing Ecological Index

Abstract

The ecological conditions in urban area are greatly changed during the process of industrialization and urbanization of China. The pressure-state-response (PSR) framework is the most popular method to evaluate the ecological quality by integrating a set of remote sensing and statistical indicators into one index through a weighting method. However, a completely remote-sensed ecological index (RSEI), integrating normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), Wet, land surface temperature (LST), and the normalized differential build-up and bare soil index (NDBSI) through principal components analysis (PCA) method, has been proposed to assess the regional ecological quality. The publications about urban ecological evaluation by RSEI often focus on only one city or a certain area and there are few types of research on the ecological quality assessment by RSEI of 35 major cities in China. In this paper, we employed RSEI to monitor the changes in the ecological quality in China' 35 major cities. The results of RSEI were compared to that of PSR and stepwise regression method was applied to establish the quantitative relationship among RSEI, NDVI, Wet, NDBSI, and LST. The results show that there are 18 cities with ecological quality deteriorated, mainly located in the east and southwest of China

Detecting Ecological Changes with a Remote Sensing Based Ecological Index (RSEI) Produced Time Series and Change Vector Analysis

“…Yue at al. (2019) have developed another ecological index that combines 17 indicators to evaluate ecological conditions in three cities, Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai [38]. They also found the evaluation results were similar to those of RSEI.…”

“…The RSEI encompasses four indicators representing climatic and land-surface biophysical variables. The index has been successfully applied to many areas to reveal the comprehensive ecological status of the areas [35][36][37][38][39]. This study aims to use RSEI to produce time series of comprehensive ecological-status images for the Fujian province of China and employ change vector analysis (CVA) to detect the ecological change of the province based on the time series of the images.…”

“…2): very poor, Level 2 (0.2-0.4): poor, Level 3 (0.4-0.6): acceptable, Level 4 (0.6-0.8): good and Level 5 (0.8-1): very good[12,38,49].…”

Dynamic Monitoring and Analysis of Ecological Quality of Pingtan Comprehensive Experimental Zone, a New Type of Sea Island City, Based on RSEI

“…In order to further explore the changes of local ecological conditions in the study area, the normalized RSEI ecological index was divided into five grades according to the numerical interval of 0.2. The values from low to high represent ecologically poor, fair, moderate, good and excellent, respectively [19,20,23], and the area and proportion of each ecological level in each year was calculated ( Table 3). Table 3 shows that, in 2007, the overall ecological quality of PZ was mainly at the moderate level (Level 3), with an area ratio of 41.2%.…”

“…The remote sensing-based ecological index (RSEI) proposed by Xu [19] is an ecological evaluation index based on remote sensing information, which integrates multiple indicators dominated by natural factors and reflects the most intuitive ecological environment. It can make up for some of the shortcomings of the existing research methods, achieve objective and quantitative evaluation of regional ecological environment conditions, analyze and visualize the spatial and temporal evolution of an ecological environment and has verified its reliability in multiple regions [20][21][22][23][24].…”