Satellite Monitoring of Urban Land Change in the Middle Yangtze River Basin Urban Agglomeration, China between 2000 and 2016

Abstract

Detailed studies on the spatiotemporal patterns of urban agglomeration in the Middle Yangtze River Basin (MYRB) are rare. This paper analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization in the MYRB using multi-temporal remote sensing data circa 2000, 2008 and 2016 integrated with geographic information system (GIS) techniques and landscape analysis approaches. A multi-level analysis of the rate and intensity, type as well as the landscape changes of urban expansion at regional, prefectural and inner-city levels was performed. Results show that the MYRB experienced rapid urban expansion with an annual expansion rate of 3.199%, especially in the Chang-Zhu-Tan and Poyang Lake metropolitan areas. The small and medium cities presented faster urban expansion than the larger cities with annual growth rates three times the average level. Urban expansion within the three capital cities was further analyzed in detail. It is found that outlying expansion and edge-expansion were the dominant growth patterns at all the three levels. Although urbanization in the MYRB has a remarkable increase in the past sixteen years, its annual growth rate of urban land expansion has fallen behind the three other large urban agglomerations in China as a result. Finally, the spatial evolution of the socioeconomic structure of the MYRB was further explored. It indicated that urban land was distributed mainly along the "northwest-southeast" direction and that the economic spatial interactions among cities showed a pattern of "multi-polarization and fragmentation", which illustrates the weak radiative driving forces of the central cities. The MYRB urban agglomeration faces a great challenge to manage trades-offs between narrowing the intra-regional disparity and maintaining synergetic development among cities.

Urbanization in Small Cities and Their Significant Implications on Landscape Structures: The Case in Ethiopia

“…Descriptions of these five categories are summarized in Table 2. Supervised image classification was done using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) Classifier algorithm which is widely applied for the urban area analysis [26,49].…”

“…In addition, such studies can help guidance concerning the actions that could slow down the negative impacts of urbanization that have already been witnessed for large cities.By analyzing the urban landscape structures, the landscape heterogeneity, and the impact of different ecological services associated with cities can be ascertained [24,25]. Landscape metrics can be useful to reveal the general circumstances of the urban landscape pattern [10,26,27], triggers of urban land use, and change analysis [11,14,15,21,[28][29][30][31][32], as well as assessing the projected future urban spatial form [13]. Landscape metrics studies are also primarily applied to detect the relationship between landscape patterns and land surface temperature [33][34][35][36].…”

Urban Expansion in Ethiopia from 1987 to 2017: Characteristics, Spatial Patterns, and Driving Forces

“…A number of quantitative approaches have been applied to compute measures of the dynamics and spatial patterns of urban landscapes, accelerated by the surge of developments of landscape ecology, remote sensing technology, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and associated fields [6,11,18,[29][30][31][32]. In particular, landscape ecology methods such as landscape metrics and buffer gradient analysis have been increasingly used to characterize and compare the dynamic process of urban land use configurations [18,19,21,30,33,34]. Additionally, in a dynamic system, urban growth typologies (leapfrog, extension, and infill) are widely used to categorize urban growth forms by measuring how new development happened about the existing urban patches [29,35,36].…”

Quantifying the Spatial Integration Patterns of Urban Agglomerations along an Inter-City Gradient

“…The geographer Gottmann presented the concept of a megalopolis [17] and Fang defined an urban agglomeration from six specific perspectives [4]. Many studies have investigated the process of urban development using the dynamics of land use patterns or urban morphology at the individual prefectural level (e.g., Morelia [18], Hangzhou [19], Tianjin [20]) or urban agglomeration level (e.g., European Metropolitan Regions [21], the Pearl River Delta [22,23], Jing-Jin-Ji Metropolitan Region [20], and the Yangtze River Delta [24]). However, some important gaps remain in current urban agglomeration-level research.…”