Detecting Land Use Changes in a Rapidly Developing City during 1990–2017 Using Satellite Imagery: A Case Study in Hangzhou Urban Area, China

Yuqing An,Dawei Liu,Jin Tsou,Yuanzhi Zhang,Yu Li,Kapo Wong

doi:10.3390/su10093303

Abstract

As one of the rapidly-developing mega cities in China, Hangzhou has experienced great land use change during the past three decades. By analyzing land use change in designated period, it is beneficial to understand urbanization process in Hangzhou, and undertake further urban management and urban planning. In this study, the land use change from 1990 to 2017 in Hangzhou urban area was detected by a method of supervised classification with Landsat TM images from 1990, 1997, 2004, 2010 and 2017, and analyzed by a Markov matrix. The results show that from 1990 to 2017, a great deal of rural areas transformed into built up areas in the Hangzhou urban area. Consequently, the urban area of Hangzhou increased eight times over the period from 1990 to 2017. This may imply that such a change should be directly related to the Chinese government policy, of which the main factor is rapidly-developing urbanization in China, such as in Hangzhou. Thus, it is believed that China’s land use change is going to be small in the following decades. This may indicate that China’s urban construction is slowing down, while its urban planning is being shifted from construction to management.

Highlights

With the acceleration of global urbanization trends and a booming world population, the demand for urban and rural construction land has been increasing dramatically
As one of the rapidly-developing first-tier cities in China, Hangzhou has experienced a great change of land use types during the past three decades
Detecting land use change over a designated period is beneficial for understanding the urbanization process in Hangzhou, and exercising more informed urban management and planning

Summary

Introduction

With the acceleration of global urbanization trends and a booming world population, the demand for urban and rural construction land has been increasing dramatically. The forest area in China was 2.228 million km in 1988, but decreased to 2.219 million km in 2008 [2]. There was a decrease of forest area of 38,743 km in China from 2000 to 2012 [3]. There is no doubt that all of the forest and woodland destroyed have been transformed to other uses in the process of global urbanization [4,5,6]. As a developing country with a large population, China has experienced rapid and large land-use change over the last three decades. According to the World Urbanization Prospects 2018, urban population in China is expected to grow up to approximately 1.09 billion by 2050 [13]. China will experience a dramatically rapid urbanization in the coming decades

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion