Abstract
Air pollution is one of the key environmental problems associated with urbanization and land use. Taking Wuhan city, Central China, as a case example, we explore the quantitative relationship between land use (built-up land, water bodies, and vegetation) and air quality (SO2, NO2, and PM10) based on nine ground-level monitoring sites from a long-term spatio-temporal perspective in 2007–2014. Five buffers with radiuses from 0.5 to 4 km are created at each site in geographical information system (GIS) and areas of land use categories within different buffers at each site are calculated. Socio-economic development, energy use, traffic emission, industrial emission, and meteorological condition are taken into consideration to control the influences of those factors on air quality. Results of bivariate correlation analysis between land use variables and annual average concentrations of air pollutants indicate that land use categories have discriminatory effects on different air pollutants, whether for the direction of correlation, the magnitude of correlation or the spatial scale effect of correlation. Stepwise linear regressions are used to quantitatively model their relationships and the results reveal that land use significantly influence air quality. Built-up land with one standard deviation growth will cause 2% increases in NO2 concentration while vegetation will cause 5% decreases. The increases of water bodies with one standard deviation are associated with 3%–6% decreases of SO2 or PM10 concentration, which is comparable to the mitigation effect of meteorology factor such as precipitation. Land use strategies should be paid much more attention while making air pollution reduction policies.
Highlights
Global land use has experienced enormous changes due to the increasing human activities and the unprecedented rates of urbanization [1,2,3]
In Weng and Yang’s study (2006 [18]), taking Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in South China, as a case example, series buffers were created for main roads and two city centers in geographical information system (GIS), the built-up density within each buffer was calculated and the results showed that the spatial patterns of air pollutants were positively correlated with urban built-up density
Inter-annual variation of concentrations of three different air pollutants in the Wuhan urban area, summarized from the nine monitoring sites, are shown as Figure 2 with the error bars representing the summarized from the nine monitoring sites, are shown as Figure 2 with the error bars representing the standard deviation of concentrations
Summary
Global land use has experienced enormous changes due to the increasing human activities and the unprecedented rates of urbanization [1,2,3]. Land use patterns and changes create tremendous stress on the local, regional and global environment [4,5,6,7,8,9]. One of the most essential environmental results of urbanization is the deterioration of air quality [10,11,12,13]. Atmosphere 2016, 7, 62 considered to be the foremost sources of air pollution, urban land use patterns and changes have a close relationship with urban air quality [17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. Compare to non-constructive land, most socio-economic activities in cities take place on built-up land and, correspondingly, massive anthropogenic air pollutants are released from built-up land into the surrounding environment [18]
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