Quantitative estimation of 21st-century urban greenspace changes in Chinese populous cities

Bin Chen; Zhen Nie; Ziyue Chen; Bing Xu

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.07.238

Quantitative estimation of 21st-century urban greenspace changes in Chinese populous cities

Sci Total Environ. 2017 Dec 31:609:956-965. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.07.238. Epub 2017 Aug 1.

Authors

Bin Chen¹, Zhen Nie², Ziyue Chen², Bing Xu³

Affiliations

¹ Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modelling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China; State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
³ Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modelling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China; State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China; Department of Geography, University of Utah, 260 S. Central Campus Dr., Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA. Electronic address: bingxu@tsinghua.edu.cn.

PMID: 28783908
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.07.238

Abstract

Understanding the spatiotemporal changes of urban greenspace is a critical requirement for supporting urban planning and maintaining the function of urbanities. Although plenty of previous studies have attempted to estimate urban greenspace changes in China, there still remain shortcomings such as inconsistent surveying procedures and insufficient spatial resolution and city samples. Using cloud-free Landsat image composites in circa years 2000 and 2014, and Defense Meteorological Program Satellite Program's Operational Line-scan System (DMSP/OLS) nighttime lights dataset, we quantitatively estimated the urban greenspace changes regarding both administrative divisions and urban core boundaries across 98 Chinese populous cities. Results showed that a consistent decline of urban greenspace coverage was identified at both old and new urban areas in the majority of analyzed cities (i.e., 81.63% of cities regarding the administrative boundaries, and 86.73% of cities regarding the urban core boundaries). Partial correlation analysis also revealed that total urban greenspace area shrank as a linear function of the core urban expansion (R²=0.28, P<0.001), and a significant correlation was confirmed between population change and urban greenspace change across those Chinese populous cities included in this study (R²=0.11, P<0.001).

Keywords: Greenspace changes; Remote sensing; Urban core; Urbanization.