Land Use and Land Cover Changes, and Environment and Risk Evaluation of Dujiangyan City (SW China) Using Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques

Biswajit Nath,Ramesh Singh,Zheng Niu

doi:10.3390/su10124631

Abstract

Understanding of the Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) change, its transitions and Landscape risk (LR) evaluation in earthquake-affected areas is important for planning and urban sustainability. In the present study, we have considered Dujiangyan City and its Environs (DCEN), a seismic-prone area close to the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (8.0 Mw) during 2007–2018. Five different multi-temporal data sets for the years 2007, 2008, 2010, 2015, and 2018 were considered for LULC mapping, followed by the maximum likelihood supervised classification technique. The individual LULC maps were further used in four time periods, i.e., 2007–2018, 2008–2018, 2010–2018, and 2015–2018, to evaluate the Land Use and Land Cover Transitions (LULCT) using combined remote sensing and GIS (Geographical Information System). Furthermore, multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) techniques were applied for LR mapping. The results of the LULC change data indicate that built-up, agricultural area, and forest cover are the prime categories that had been changed by the natural and anthropogenic activities. LULCT, along with multi-parameters, are suggested to avoid development in fault-existing areas that are seismically vulnerable for future landscape planning in a sustainable manner.

Highlights

The knowledge of spatio-temporal Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) is important for understanding the dynamics of the environments of urban areas that are associated with landscape transitions [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Studies of LULC are important for understanding many of the observed phenomena that are responsible for changes [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20], landscape changes [21,22,23,24,25,26], landscape fragmentation [27,28], changes in ecosystems [29,30], climate changes [31], the growth of urban areas [32,33] and LULC changes, based on sustainable development [34,35]
This paper focuses on the main objective for the quantitative evaluation of spatio-temporal changes of LULC, Land Use and Land Cover Transitions (LULCT) since 2007–2018, and recent 2018 data was considered as an ancillary data to identify Landscape risk (LR) areas across the Dujiangyan City and its Environs (DCEN)

Summary

Introduction

The knowledge of spatio-temporal Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) is important for understanding the dynamics of the environments of urban areas that are associated with landscape transitions [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Based on the European Environment Agency (EEA) Report (no: 10/2017), the landscape is undergoing fast and large-scale transformations according to land use changes, and a detailed analysis of land cover provides information about the drivers of the transitions [49]. The spatio-temporal dynamics of LULC changes in metropolitan areas over the world have been carried out [50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57] in watershed [58,59], coastal [60], and wildlife sanctuary areas [61] using multi-temporal remote sensing data

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion