Evolution of ecological patterns of land use changes in European metropolitan areas

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the evolution of land-use patterns and the Eco-Environmental Quality Index (EQI) in major European metropolitan areas. To this end, nighttime remote sensing images will be used to delineate ten major European metropolitan areas with more than 1 million inhabitants and CLC land cover data will be used to reclassify European land occupation types from 2000 to 2018. Based on MODIS satellite remote sensing imagery, the evolution of EQI was studied for the EQI evaluation systems applicable to different periods and different regions. The results show that in Europe, cultivated cover and discontinuous built-up cover occupy the largest part of the land, but the former is shrinking and the latter is expanding. Other land areas are much smaller than the previous two. Among them, grassland has always shown a growing trend, and the fastest growing area is industrial land, while the slow-expanding land includes transportation land, leisure land and water bodies. The overall result of the EQI was estimated to be around 0.59. The average result in 2000 was the highest, with a decrease in 2006, but a small increase since then. The ecological environment of each metropolitan area has experienced both improvement and deterioration. Overall conditions improved in Barcelona, the English central agglomeration, Rome and the diffuse landscape of Northern Italy, London and Naples. But The Belgian/Dutch agglomeration, the lands of Paris and the Rhine-Ruhr, the vast majority of the ecological quality is deteriorating. Madrid's EQI worsened the most.