Identifying Population Hollowing Out Regions and Their Dynamic Characteristics across Central China

Bin Guo, Yi Bian, Lin Pei (), Xiaowei Zhu (), Dingming Zhang, Wencai Zhang, Xianan Guo and Qiuji Chen
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Bin Guo: College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China
Yi Bian: College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China
Lin Pei: School of Exercise and Health Sciences, Xi’an Physical Education University, Xi’an 710068, China
Xiaowei Zhu: Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Portland State University, Portland, OR 97207, USA
Dingming Zhang: College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China
Wencai Zhang: College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China
Xianan Guo: College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China
Qiuji Chen: College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 16, 1-19

Abstract: Continuous urbanization and industrialization lead to plenty of rural residents migrating to cities for a living, which seriously accelerated the population hollowing issues. This generated series of social issues, including residential estate idle and numerous vigorous laborers migrating from undeveloped rural areas to wealthy cities and towns. Quantitatively determining the population hollowing characteristic is the priority task of realizing rural revitalization. However, the traditional field investigation methods have obvious deficiencies in describing socio-economic phenomena, especially population hollowing, due to weak efficiency and low accuracy. Here, this paper conceives a novel scheme for representing population hollowing levels and exploring the spatiotemporal dynamic of population hollowing. The nighttime light images were introduced to identify the potential hollowing areas by using the nightlight decreasing trend analysis. In addition, the entropy weight approach was adopted to construct an index for evaluating the population hollowing level based on statistical datasets at the political boundary scale. Moreover, we comprehensively incorporated physical and anthropic factors to simulate the population hollowing level via random forest (RF) at a grid-scale, and the validation was conducted to evaluate the simulation results. Some findings were achieved. The population hollowing phenomenon decreasing gradually was mainly distributed in rural areas, especially in the north of the study area. The RF model demonstrated the best accuracy with relatively higher R 2 (Mean = 0.615) compared with the multiple linear regression (MLR) and the geographically weighted regression (GWR). The population hollowing degree of the grid-scale was consistent with the results of the township scale. The population hollowing degree represented an obvious trend that decreased in the north but increased in the south during 2016–2020 and exhibited a significant reduction trend across the entire study area during 2019–2020. The present study supplies a novel perspective for detecting population hollowing and provides scientific support and a first-hand dataset for rural revitalization.

Keywords: population distribution; random forest; nighttime light; modeling; remote sensing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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