Abstract
Abstract. Quantifying urban expansion forms is important to understanding regional urbanization processes and urban planning. For this purpose, conventional landscape indices are commonly used for quantitative analysis of urban landscape patterns. However, these landscape indices only reflect information for one particular temporal phase of landscape patterns. This paper studies and quantifies the dynamic changes of urban landscape from 1993 to 2006 in Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan metropolitan areas in Hunan province of China using landscape expansion index (LEI), which contains information of the formation processes of landscape patterns. The results indicate that there are three types of urban expansions: infilling, edge-expansion and outlying in the study area. The change of proportion of the three urban expansion types reveals that urban expansion patterns have changed from a messy, dispersed early development phase to more compact and reasonable layout from 1993 to 2006. Moreover, the urban expansion modes varied in different periods. From 1993 to 1996, the edge-expansion and outlying were the main types of urban expansion forms, indicating an early stage of rapid urban developments. Comparing with the edge-expansion, the outlying expansion increased rapidly in this period, which indicates urban development is messy and dispersion. Overall, the edge-expansion was the major type of urban expansion form during the study period with outlying as the second and rapidly-increasing major form of expansion prior to 1998, which indicates urbanization is in the early stage of rapid urban developments, and infilling as the second and rapidly-increasing major form of expansion after 1998.
Highlights
Since the 20th century, urbanization has been accelerated globally
Based on landscape expansion index (LEI) described in the previous section, this section presents the study results related to the identification of different types of urban expansions and expansion modes in different time periods
According to the landscape expansion index (LEI) value and threshold of different types of urban expansions, the distribution of urban expansion types are identified in the four different periods from 1993 to 2006
Summary
Since the 20th century, urbanization has been accelerated globally. With ongoing urbanization, a large population is inclined to concentrate in urban areas. In order to quantify and describe changes in urban land-use patterns beyond extent and growth rates, landscape indices have been applied to urban morphology (Luck and Wu, 2002; Herold et al, 2003; Seto et al, 2005). These indices have been used to conduct empirical analyses of landscape patterns, they are generally focused on simple analysis and description of the geometric features of a landscape patch or pattern, while neglecting information on dynamic changes of landscape patterns (Liu et al, 2009). The dynamic changes of urban landscape from 1993 to 2006 in Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan metropolitan areas is quantified and expressed using landscape expansion index (LEI), which contains information of the formation processes of landscape pattern
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