Spatiotemporal Patterns and Driving Force of Urbanization and Its Impact on Urban Ecology

Abstract

Urbanization inevitably poses a threat to urban ecology by altering its external structure and internal attributes. Nighttime light (NTL) has become increasingly extensive and practical, offering a special perspective on the world in revealing urbanization. In this study, we applied the Normalized Impervious Surface Index (NISI) constructed by NTL and MODIS NDVI to examine the urbanization process in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD). Geographical detectors combined with factors involving human and natural influences were utilized to investigate the drive mechanism. Urban ecology stress was evaluated based on changes in urban morphological patterns and fractional vegetation cover (FVC). The results showed that the NISI can largely overcome the obstacle of directly coupling NTL data in performing urbanization and has efficient applicability in the long-term pixel scale. Built-up areas in the YRD increased by 2.83 times during the past two decades, from 2053.5 to 7872.5 km2. Urbanization intensity has saturated the city center and is spilling over into the suburbs, which show a “cold to hot” spatial clustering distribution. Economic factors are the primary forces driving urbanization, and road network density is becoming essential as factor that reflects urban infrastructure. Urban geometry pattern changes in fractal dimension (FD) and compactness revealed the ecological stress from changing urban external structure, and internal ecological stress was clear from the negative effect on 63.4% FVC. This impact gradually increased in urban expanded area and synchronously decreased when urbanization saturated the core area. An analysis of ecological stress caused by urbanization from changing physical structure and social attributes can provide evidence for urban management and coordinated development.

Chinese urbanization promoted terrestrial ecosystem health by implementing high‐quality development and ecological management

“…Social and economic factors were the main driving force for urbanization development (Figure 11). Among them, GDP and population were the key factors stimulating urbanization (Zhang, Du, et al, 2022). Economic development drives the rural-urban demographic transition.…”

“…Meanwhile, solar radiation affects vegetation cover mainly through plant photosynthesis. Additionally, elevation and slope had less effect on urbanization, mainly because regional development with high altitude and steep terrain tended to require more capital investment (Zhang, Du, et al, 2022).…”

“…Likewise, the city is an open human‐land coupling social system, and the urbanization process is driven by many aspects. Among them, social and economic factors such as marketization, industrialization, trade, education, democracy, and transportation have become favorable factors to promote urbanization (Zhang, Du, et al, 2022). However, the influence of geographical factors is rarely included, which should be considered when conducting urban dynamics analysis (Christensen & McCord, 2016).…”

Spatial and temporal variation of economic resilience and its drivers: Evidence from Chinese cities

“…Geographic detector is a statistical method to distinguish spatial divergence and reveal the driving factors behind it (Wang et al, 2010) and then widely used in economic and social fields (Ju et al, 2016;Yang et al, 2016;Hou et al, 2022;Liu et al, 2022;Meng et al, 2022;Quan et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2022a;Zhang et al, 2022), Compared with traditional statistical methods, geographic detector have the advantage of being immune to covariates between independent variables (Ding et al, 2019). It is possible to analyze not only the magnitude of the driving effects of the factors, but also the interactions between them (Feng et al, 2020).…”

Site Selection of Urban Parks Based on Fuzzy-Analytic Hierarchy Process (F-AHP): A Case Study of Nanjing, China

“…With continued global urbanization and rapid economic developments, meeting the production and living needs of the population that is gathered in cities will inevitably have a severe effect on the ecological environment [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ], causing a series of urban environmental problems, such as traffic congestion [ 5 , 6 , 7 ], environmental degradation [ 8 , 9 ], vegetation destruction, and air pollution [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Urban parks are essential for enhancing city air quality, lowering noise pollution in urban areas, and fostering sustainable urban growth [ 17 , 18 , 19 ].…”