Monitoring Environment Transformation Along the BTIC Railway Based on Remote Sensing by Utilizing the R_RSEI

Abstract

High-speed railway offers an opportunity to address the disparity between economic development and transportation capacity. It can improve transportation capacity and reduce transportation costs. With the large-scale running of the high-speed railway, initial activities will impact the surrounding ecological environment. Ecological environment monitoring along the railway is very important. However, the current research focuses mainly on a single ecological index evaluation of ecological problems and mostly on the ecological evaluation along the highway, with less research on ecological monitoring along the high-speed railway. Moreover, the studies have not considered the comprehensive effects of multiple remote sensing indexes. Given the above scientific issues, taking the Beijing–Tianjin Intercity (BTIC ) railway as the study area, we selected the Landsat satellite images from 2008, 2011, 2014, 2017, and 2020 as the research data. We used the revised remote sensing–based ecological index (R_RSEI) to comprehensively analyze and evaluate the ecological environment quality along the BTIC railway from 2008 to 2020. After extracting the greenness, dryness, humidity, and heat indices, we determined the weights of four indices using principal component analysis. According to the ecological environment assessment index model, we monitored and analyzed the ecological environment along the BTIC railway. The results showed that the ecological environment quality along the BTIC railway generally increased from 2008 to 2011 and then generally decreased from 2014 to 2020. The ecological and environmental qual- ity of the study area generally was ranked as "poor" and "worse." Therefore, the trend of environmental pollution along the BTIC railway was not optimistic and thus led to many problems in the ecological environment. The proposed method is expected to solve the lack or the single problem of ecological evaluation index along the railway line.