Delineation of the Urban-Rural Boundary through Data Fusion: Applications to Improve Urban and Rural Environments and Promote Intensive and Healthy Urban Development.

Jun Zhang,Xue Zhang,Xueping Tan,Xiaodie Yuan

doi:10.3390/ijerph18137180

Jun Zhang, Xue Zhang + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18137180

Copy DOI

Abstract

As one of the most important methods for limiting urban sprawl, the accurate delineation of the urban–rural boundary not only promotes the intensive use of urban resources, but also helps to alleviate the urban issues caused by urban sprawl, realizing the intensive and healthy development of urban cities. Previous studies on delineating urban–rural boundaries were only based on the level of urban and rural development reflected by night-time light (NTL) data, ignoring the differences in the spatial development between urban and rural areas; so, the comprehensive consideration of NTL and point of interest (POI) data can help improve the accuracy of urban–rural boundary delineation. In this study, the NTL and POI data were fused using wavelet transform, and then the urban–rural boundary before and after data fusion was delineated by multiresolution segmentation. Finally, the delineation results were verified. The verification result shows that the accuracy of delineating the urban–rural boundary using only NTL data is 84.20%, and the Kappa value is 0.6549; the accuracy using the fusion of NTL and POI data on the basis of wavelet transform is 93.2%, and the Kappa value is 0.8132. Therefore, we concluded that the proposed method of using wavelet transform to fuse NTL and POI data considers the differences between urban and rural development, which significantly improves the accuracy of the delineation of urban–rural boundaries. Accurate delineation of urban–rural boundaries is helpful for optimizing internal spatial structure in both urban and rural areas, alleviating environmental problems resulting from urban development, assisting the formulation of development policies for urban and rural fringes, and promoting the intensive and healthy development of urban areas.

Highlights

As a boundary that separates urban from rural areas, the urban–rural boundary refers to a city or region that is constantly changing in the process of urban expansion [1].delineating the urban–rural boundary has become one of the most important connotations of new urbanization, and is important for alleviating various urban issues [2].rapid urbanization construction is mainly driven by capital, which inevitably leads to the disorderly expansion of cities
We found after on-site confirmation with Google Earth that among the 1000 selected pixel points, 181 pixel points were located in urban areas and 819 pixel points were located in rural areas
Based on the use of night-time light (NTL) data to delineate urban–rural boundaries, we proposed an image fusion method based on wavelet transform to fuse NTL and point of interest (POI) data at the pixel scale

Summary

Introduction

As a boundary that separates urban from rural areas, the urban–rural boundary refers to a city or region that is constantly changing in the process of urban expansion [1].delineating the urban–rural boundary has become one of the most important connotations of new urbanization, and is important for alleviating various urban issues [2].rapid urbanization construction is mainly driven by capital, which inevitably leads to the disorderly expansion of cities. The direct manifestation of a disorderly expansion is those cities constantly consumes rural land resources, and the use rate of these resources is very low [3,4]. The accurate delineation of the urban–rural boundary can be used to effectively curb the rural resource plundering by urban areas, and improve the relationship between urban and rural areas, so as to promote the intensive use of urban resources and achieve the healthy development of cities [5]. Rapid urbanization contributes to the rapid development of a regional economy and the rapid expansion of urban areas to rural areas, it has created urban–rural environmental problems, including low efficiency of land use, environmental pollution, Int. J.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion