Urban Land-Cover Changes in Major Cities in China from 1990 to 2015

Qian Ding, Tao Pan, Tao Lin and Chi Zhang ()
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Qian Ding: Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Water and Soil Conservation and Environmental Protection, College of Resources and Environment, Linyi University, Linyi 270600, China
Tao Pan: School of Geography and Tourism, Qufu Normal University, Rizhao 276826, China
Tao Lin: Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen 361021, China
Chi Zhang: Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Water and Soil Conservation and Environmental Protection, College of Resources and Environment, Linyi University, Linyi 270600, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 23, 1-15

Abstract: The accelerated urbanization process in China has led to land-cover changes, triggering a series of environmental issues as one of the major drivers of global change. We studied the land-cover changes in the built-up areas of 50 major cities in China from 1990 to 2015 with Landsat data combined with spectral unmixing methods and decision tree classification. The overall accuracy of urban land-cover type products with 30 m resolution was obtained as 84%, which includes impervious surfaces, bare soil, vegetation, and water bodies. Based on these land-cover type products, the results show that the urbanization of major cities in China manifests itself as a steep expansion of impervious surfaces (+32.91%) and vegetation (+36.93%), while the proportion of bare soil (−68.64%) and water bodies (−1.20%) decreases. The increase in vegetation indicates an increasing emphasis on greening during urbanization, which is especially vital for the sustainability of urban ecosystems. Increasing economic standards and population sizes are significantly correlated with impervious surface expansion and may be the main drivers of urbanization. Nationwide, there is a decreasing trend of shape complexity among different large cities, which indicates that landscape shapes will gradually become regular when cities grow to a certain level. Greenspace areas in the cities increased significantly during 1990–2015 and became more fragmented and tended to disperse across cities. These changes reflect the government’s efforts to enhance urban ecosystem functions to serve the rapidly increasing urban population in China over the past three decades.

Keywords: urban expansion; land-cover change; greening; impervious surfaces; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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