Long-term evaluation on urban intensive land use in five fast-growing cities of northern China with GEE support

Yiqun Shang,Rongqing Han,Fei Xiao,Xinqi Zheng,Wenchao Liu

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-00285-8

Abstract

Intensive land use (ILU) is a multi-objective optimization process that aims to simultaneously improve the economic, social, and ecological benefits, as well as the carrying capacity of the land, without increasing additional land, and evaluation of the ILU over long time series has a guiding significance for rational land use. To tackle inefficient extraction of information, subjective selection of dominant factor, and lack of prediction in previous evaluation studies, this paper proposes a novel framework for evaluation and analysis of ILU by, first, using Google Earth Engine (GEE) to extract cities’ built-up land information, second, by constructing an index system that links economic, social and ecological aspects to evaluate the ILU degree, third, by applying Geodetector to identify the dominant factor on the ILU, finally, by using the S-curve to predict the degree. Based on the case study data from northern China’s five fast-growing cities (i.e., Beijing, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, Jinan, Zhengzhou), the findings show that the ILU degree for all cities has increased over the past 30 years, with the highest growth rate between 2000 and 2010. Beijing had the highest degree in 2018, followed by Tianjin, Zhengzhou, Jinan, and Shijiazhuang. In terms of the time dimension, the dominant factor for all cities shifted from the output-value proportion of secondary and tertiary industries in the early stage to the economic density in the late stage. In terms of the space dimension, the dominant factor varied from cities. It is worth noting that economic density was the dominant factor in the two high-level ILU cities, Beijing and Tianjin, indicating that economic strength is the main driver of the ILU. Moreover, cities with high-level ILU at the current stage will grow slowly in the ILU degree from 2020 to 2035, while Zhengzhou and Jinan, whose ILU has been in the midstream recently, will grow the most among the cities.

Highlights

Since the 1990s, China has experienced massive population growth and rapid socio-economic development, resulting in numerous challenges, land problems[1]
We took the five cities as a whole, utilized Geodetector to explore the dominant factor from two time periods (1990–2000 and 2005–2018)
This paper developed an index system based on the economic, social, ecological aspects, rapidly extracted builtup land information with Google Earth Engine (GEE) support, and used the entropy weighting method to evaluate the Intensive land use (ILU) degree by combining socio-economic statistics

Summary

Introduction

Since the 1990s, China has experienced massive population growth and rapid socio-economic development, resulting in numerous challenges, land problems[1]. Given the spatial heterogeneity of geographical phenomena and the complex process of the phenomenon response to the influencing factors, the inflexible linear models are unlikely to accurately reveal the inner mechanism between the factor and the phenomenon, and the presence of exogenous covariates (e.g., individual choices, policy regulations) can limit the usefulness of the m odel[24] To address these issues, Geodetector, based on the theory of spatial stratified heterogeneity, was proposed to measure spatial stratified heterogeneity and explore the driving forces of factors on the p henomenon[25]. As an indirect indicator to assess the quality of the urbanization evolution, the ILU degree can theoretically be modeled using the S-curve This finding will provide references for subsequent ILU prediction studies and give better scientific support for land use optimization

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion