Spatial Pattern and the Process of Settlement Expansion in Jiangsu Province from 1980 to 2010, Eastern China

Yan Xu,Lijie Pu,Lifang Zhang

doi:10.3390/su6118180

Abstract

Human settlement expansion has very important effects on regional population migration, economic balance and ecosystem services. Understanding the evolution of settlement expansion and regional differences is significant for regional sustainability. The results showed that in the past 30 years, the urbanization rate in Jiangsu province was lower. From 1980 to 2010, the expansion area of urban settlement was larger than that of rural settlement. Urban settlement expanded slowly from 1980 to 2005 and strongly from 2005 to 2010. Rural settlement expanded greatly from 1980 to 1995, and 37.14% of settlement was mostly on cropland. The type of urban settlement expansion from 1980 to 1995 and from 2000 to 2005 was compact expansion. Settlement expansion in the south of Jiangsu province was greater than that in the north of Jiangsu province. The spatial pattern of settlement in most cities was a cluster. In the past 30 years, urban and rural settlement expansion had significantly different impacts on the soil and water environment. Urban settlement expansion was great in the south of Jiangsu province and widened the economic and social gap between the south and north of Jiangsu province.

Highlights

Global changes are significant issues worldwide and presenting scholars and government managers with challenges [1,2,3]
The settlement proportion in Jiangsu province increased from 10.76% to 18.22% from 1980 to 2010
Settlement expansion in Jiangsu province was driven by the development of the economy after

Summary

Introduction

Global changes are significant issues worldwide and presenting scholars and government managers with challenges [1,2,3]. Land use and land cover change (LUCC) has always been recognized as a key indicator in the field of global changes [10,11,12,13,14]. Human settlements are an important issue of LUCC and have a high correlation with ecosystem and environment conservation [13,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]. The changes of settlements reflect the interaction between humans and the natural environment [11]. The human settlements of cities are a function of the natural environment, society and economy, and their suitability directly affects the production, life, environment and transportation of cites [26,27]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion