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Monitoring urban expansion and its effects on land use and land cover changes in Guangzhou city, China

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Abstract

There are widespread concerns about urban sprawl in China. In response, modeling and assessing urban expansion and subsequent land use and land cover (LULC) changes have become important approaches to support decisions about appropriate development and land resource use. Guangzhou, a major metropolitan city in South China, has experienced rapid urbanization and great economic growth in the past few decades. This study applied a series of Landsat images to assess the urban expansion and subsequent LULC changes over 35 years, from 1979 to 2013. From start to end, urban expansion increased by 1512.24 km2 with an annual growth rate of 11.25 %. There were four stages of urban growth: low rates from 1979 to 1990, increased rates from 1990 to 2001, high rates from 2001 to 2009, and steady increased rates from 2009 to 2013. There were also three different urban growth types in these different stages: edge-expansion growth, infilling growth, and spontaneous growth. Other land cover, such as cropland, forest, and mosaics of cropland and natural vegetation, were severely impacted as a result. To analyze these changes, we used landscape metrics to characterize the changes in the spatial patterns across the Guangzhou landscape and the impacts of urban growth on other types of land cover. The significant changes in LULC and urban expansion were highly correlated with economic development, population growth, technical progress, policy elements, and other similar indexes.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Science and Information Technology Department of Guangzhou. We would like to thank Jiquan Chen for the helpful comments on the earlier draft of this paper. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and advices in improving the first manuscript.

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  1. Department of Ecology, School of Life Sciences/State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol/Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Urban Landscape Dynamics, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510275, China

    Yanyan Wu, Shuyuan Li & Shixiao Yu

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  1. Yanyan Wu
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Correspondence to Shixiao Yu.

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Wu, Y., Li, S. & Yu, S. Monitoring urban expansion and its effects on land use and land cover changes in Guangzhou city, China. Environ Monit Assess 188, 54 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-015-5069-2

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