Abstract
Abstract. China’s cities have been undergoing rapid and intense urbanization processes in the past few decades. Shandong is a coastal province which is located in East China with big economy and population scales, and which also plays an important role in the rapid process of China’s modernization. The DMSP/OLS dataset has been widely used for the urban development assessments in long time-series and large spatial scales situations. In this paper, we used a time series of nighttime light data to estimate the landscape spatial pattern changes of cities in Shandong province from 1994 to 2012. Nine landscape metrics were calculated and analyzed to figure out the spatial patterns of urban area developments of the cities in Shandong province. The landscape metrics include the number of patches (NP), the landscape total area (TA), the aggregation index (AI), the largest patch index (LPI), the mean patch area (AREA_MN), the landscape shape index (LSI), the total edge length (TE), the edge density (ED), and the mean radius of gyration (GYRATE_MN). The experimental results reveal that, in 1994–2012, the total urban area of cities in Shandong province expanded for 1.17 times, the average urban area increased by about 93.00%, the average annual growth rate of the TE metric is 2.67 %, while the ED metric decreased about 1.44 % annually. Bigger cities in this area show relative slower urbanization development processes, such as Jinan and Qingdao. Coastal cities represented much more rapid expansion velocities than inland cities. In the middle area of Shandong province, the connectivity between developed urban areas was constantly increased.
Highlights
In the last several decades, with the rapid growth of China’s economy and continuous investments of infrastructure constructions, China’s cities have been experiencing an intense developing process with remarkable urban built-up area expansions, energy consumptions and population migrations (Ma et al 2012b)
We focused on nine landscape metrics to analyze the differences of spatial patterns between 17 prefecture-level cities in Shandong province
The value of aggregation index (AI) metric was calculated among classes in the same landscape allow reasonable comparisons as an index to quantify the level of aggregation of spatial patterns (He el at. 2000)
Summary
In the last several decades, with the rapid growth of China’s economy and continuous investments of infrastructure constructions, China’s cities have been experiencing an intense developing process with remarkable urban built-up area expansions, energy consumptions and population migrations (Ma et al 2012b). It is necessary to evaluate the spatial and temporal patterns of cities in Shandong province to support policy making in environmental management and urban planning, in response to the remarkably rapid urbanization processes occurring in this region. The DMSP/OLS sensor could detect low-level visible and near-infrared bands radiance signals at night and the composed stable nighttime light imageries have been widely used for urban development mapping (Elvidge et al 1997; Small et al 2005; Zhang et al 2011; Zhou et al 2014, Xu et al 2014), city built-up area expansion trends exploring (Sutton 2003; Ma et al 2016) and socioeconomic activities detecting (Doll et al 2006; Elvidge et al 2009). The low cost and easy for acquisition characters of the DMSP/OLS
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
