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Urbanization-induced Land Use and Cover Changes in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province since the Mid-1990s
Authors: Hui Dai, Xuezhen Zhang, Zhaoling Hu
Number of views: 443
The characteristics of urban expansion and land use change in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province were studied using Landsat images from 1994, 2005 and 2014. First, we used the maximum likelihood method to perform a supervised classification to retrieve land use/cover categories. With the confusion matrix approach, the total accuracy of the classification was estimated to be 90.38%, 89.81% and 89.57%, respectively, for 1994, 2005, and 2014. Second, by comparing land use patterns with each other for the three time slices, urban expansion and land use changes were revealed. The results show that urban area increased from 135.48 km2 in 1994 to 323.28 km2 in 2005 and to 456.33 km2 in 2014. The newly developed urban areas mainly extended to the southwest from 1994 to 2005 and to the east and southeast from 2005 to 2014. The expansion of urban area mostly came at the cost of a decrease in arable land. The net conversions from arable land to urban area reached as high as 298.04 km2 during the period from 1994 to 2014. At the decadal scale, the urban expansion appears likely to precede economic growth. The implication is that urban expansion provided good conditions for economic growth rather than being driven by economic growth.
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