Abstract
Urban greenness plays a vital role in supporting the ecosystem services of a city. Exploring the dynamics of urban greenness space and their driving forces can provide valuable information for making solid urban planning policies. This study aims to investigate the dynamics of urban greenness space patterns through landscape indices and to apply geographically weighted regression (GWR) to map the spatially varied impact on the indices from economic and environmental factors. Two typical landscape indices, i.e., percentage of landscape (PLAND) and aggregation index (AI), which measure the abundance and fragmentation of urban greenness coverage, respectively, were taken to map the changes in urban greenness. As a case study, the metropolis of Wuhan, China was selected, where time-series of urban greenness space were extracted at an annual step from the Landsat collections from Google Earth Engine during 2000–2018. The study shows that the urban greenness space not only decreased significantly, but also tended to be more fragmented over the years. Road network density, normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), terrain elevation and slope, and precipitation were found to significantly correlate to the landscape indices. GWR modeling successfully captures the spatially varied impact from the considered factors and the results from GWR modeling provide a critical reference for making location-specific urban planning.
Highlights
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities [1]
percentage of landscape (PLAND) measures the area of the land cover type standardized by the total area of the landscape [34], while aggregation index (AI) reflects the degree of aggregation or extension of patches for that type [55]
This study has selected Wuhan, China as the case area to examine the temporal changes of urban greenness space and the driving factors explaining the patterns in the changes
Summary
More than half of the world’s population lives in cities [1]. 2018 estimated that 68% of the world’s population would dwell in cities by 2050 [2]. The process of urbanization deeply affected vegetation patterns and ecosystem services, as it could significantly update the material circulation and energy flow of an area [5,6]. As a typical outcome in terms of land fragmentation from urbanization, a large vegetation patch is often cut into smaller pieces, which could result in diminished urban greenness. It is well recognized that urban greenness space provides various ecosystem services to inhabitants in cities [7,8]. Compared to other land cover types, urban greenness coverage has a more profound impact on the sustainable development within and around a city [9]. Dennis et al confirmed that urban green infrastructure had a key
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