Abstract
China is building forest urban groups through reforestation and afforestation. However, the fast process of urbanization inevitably conflicts with multiple vegetated areas around cities. Hence, it is critical to evaluate the changes in regional vegetation cover and its spatial pattern due to complex natural and anthropogenic factors. Nevertheless, systematic studies to quantify and compare the development of forest urban agglomerations were rarely reported. Based on a remote sensing landcover dataset from 1992 to 2015, this study investigated forest cover changes and the impacts on landscape pattern in several urban groups, and tried to explore their differences between the inland and coastal regions of China. The results showed that over the past 24 years, the forest coverage in the coastal urban agglomerations declined (103 km2/year) while it increased (26 km2/year) in the inland urban agglomerations. There was a certain conflict between forest and cropland for the coastal urban agglomerations where the forest area converted to cropland accounted for 61.9% of the total forest loss. The increase in forests coverage in inland urban agglomerations mainly came from grassland which nearly accounted for 66.47% of the total increase. The landscape diversity has also changed in areas where forests have changed significantly (e.g., Shanghai, Changzhi, and Jincheng).
Highlights
As the largest developing country in the world, China is in the stage of rapid urban development, which has caused a drastic spatio-temporal impact on land-use/land-cover (LULC) around cities [1,2]
The results showed that the patch density (PD) in the two coastal urban agglomerations increased over the years, while that in the inland urban agglomerations showed a declining trend
This study showed that between 1992 and 2015, the forests in the coastal urban agglomerations significantly declined, while that in the inland urban agglomerations raised to some extent between 1992 and 2015
Summary
As the largest developing country in the world, China is in the stage of rapid urban development, which has caused a drastic spatio-temporal impact on land-use/land-cover (LULC) around cities [1,2]. Landscape pattern is a concept in landscape ecology, which indicates that a series of landscape elements of different sizes and shapes are formed by nature or man-made It is a complex interaction of various complex physical, biological, and social factors [8,9,10,11,12]. The landscape pattern index is a commonly used method and tool in current research Many indices, such as the Shannon diversity index, fragmentation index, and aggregation index, are widely used to quantitatively evaluate the relationship between land cover and regional spatial patterns (such as patch fragmentation, landscape diversity, and spatial aggregation) [13,14,15,16] and the relationship between LUCC and ecological processes [17,18,19,20]
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