Assessing Potential Bioenergy Production on Urban Marginal Land in 20 Major Cities of China by the Use of Multi-View High-Resolution Remote Sensing Data

Ben Zhang, Jie Yang and Yinxia Cao
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Ben Zhang: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
Jie Yang: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
Yinxia Cao: School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-20

Abstract: For the purpose of bioenergy production, biomass cropping on marginal land is an appropriate method. Less consideration has been given to estimating the marginal land in cities at a fine spatial resolution, especially in China. Marginal land within cities has great potential for bioenergy production. Therefore, in this research, the urban marginal land of 20 representative cities of China was estimated by using detailed land-cover and 3D building morphology information derived from Ziyuan-3 high-resolution remote sensing imagery, and ancillary geographical data, including land use, soil type, and digital elevation model data. We then classified the urban marginal land into “vacant land” and “land between buildings”, and further revealed its landscape patterns. Our results showed that: (1) the suitable marginal land area ranged from 17.78 ± 1.66 km 2 to 353.48 ± 54.19 km 2 among the 20 cities; (2) it was estimated that bioethanol production on marginal land could amount to 0.005–0.13 mT, corresponding to bioenergy of 2.1 × 10 13 –4.0 × 10 14 J for one city; (3) from the landscape viewpoint, the marginal landscape pattern tended to be more fragmented in more developed cities. Our results will help urban planners to reclaim unused urban land and develop distributed bioenergy projects at the city scale.

Keywords: bioenergy; biomass cropping; urban marginal land; high resolution; Ziyuan-3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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