Spatiotemporal dynamics and driving factors of vegetation coverage around linear cultural heritage: A case study of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal

Aihui Jiang; Fengzhi Sun; Baolei Zhang; Quanyuan Wu; Shangshu Cai; Zhiwei Yang; Yong Chang; Rongqing Han; Sisi Yu

doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119431

Spatiotemporal dynamics and driving factors of vegetation coverage around linear cultural heritage: A case study of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal

J Environ Manage. 2024 Jan 1:349:119431. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119431. Epub 2023 Oct 23.

Authors

Aihui Jiang¹, Fengzhi Sun¹, Baolei Zhang¹, Quanyuan Wu¹, Shangshu Cai², Zhiwei Yang¹, Yong Chang¹, Rongqing Han¹, Sisi Yu³

Affiliations

¹ College of Geography and Environment, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, 250358, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China.
³ Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hubei, 430074, China. Electronic address: yusisi@wbgcas.cn.

PMID: 37879223
DOI: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2023.119431

Abstract

Linear cultural heritage, which plays significant roles in safeguarding the world's cultural and maintaining global civilization, has obtained rising concerns in purpose of sustainability. However, in view of existing publications, most attention has been paid on its values of recreation, history and culture. Its ecological environment is still poorly understood. As the longest linear cultural heritage in the world and spiritual symbol of China, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal (BHGC) was selected as the study area in this study. We focused on the vegetation coverage around the BHGC from 2000 to 2020 and aimed to practically investigate whether and why vegetation distributes imbalanced along the entire BHGC. The annual Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), derived from Landsat images, was used to indicate the spatiotemporal dynamics of vegetation coverage. Based on ten natural and human interference factors, the geographic detector model was applied to analyze its driving mechanism. Results show that (1) vegetation coverage around the BHGC presented apparently spatial heterogeneity. Cities located at both ends of the BHGC showed lower vegetation coverage, whereas those in the middle were relatively higher. (2) Vegetation coverage in 23 cities around the BHGC was relatively stable over time, i.e., nearly 76.39% of the study area was measured unchanged trend. The slight degradation mainly occurred to the sub-urban and extra-urban areas. (3) The driving forces of human interferences on vegetation coverage dynamics around the BHGC surpassed natural factors from 2000 to 2020. Population density, GDP and cultural heritage density presented higher explanatory powers of vegetation growth compared to other seven factors. These findings provide a scientific basis for local governments to intervene in vegetation changes and ecological restoration through natural and human factors within the favorable scope.

Keywords: Beijing-hangzhou grand canal; Cultural heritage; Geographic detector model; Trend analysis; Vegetation.

MeSH terms

Beijing
China
Cities
Ecosystem*
Environment*
Humans