Yu Sisi, Leichtle Tobias, Zhang Zengxiang, Liu Fang, Wang Xiao, Yan Xue, Taubenböck Hannes
Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430074, China; German Aerospace Center, German Remote Sensing Data Center, Oberpfaffenhofen 82234, Germany; Institute of Local Government Development, Shantou University, Shantou 515063, China.
German Aerospace Center, German Remote Sensing Data Center, Oberpfaffenhofen 82234, Germany.
Sci Total Environ. 2023 Nov 10;898:166373. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.166373. Epub 2023 Aug 16.
Urban growth is recognized as the conversion of vegetated surface to built-up surface. However, there is still no consensus about the urbanization-induced dynamic of vegetation greenness in view of existing literatures. In this study, we aimed to empirically investigate whether urban growth mean the loss of vegetation greenness. We selected 340 Chinese cities as the study areas, relied on consistent multi-temporal remotely sensed data and adopted linear regression analysis, annual growth area, Tail-Sen slope and Mann-Kendall models. Results show that although vegetation greening generally lagged behind urban growth in the monitoring period, a tendency of their consistent speeding up can be observed over time. By categorizing four forms and four trends of vegetation greenness dynamics related to urban growth, we revealed the diversity of Chinese cities. The former focused on the velocity of urban growth and vegetation greenness dynamics within newly urbanized area in three phases, i.e., 2003-2008, 2008-2013 and 2013-2018. The latter focused on the interannual trends of vegetation greenness dynamics among the previously existing and newly urbanized areas. The key finding is that, in over 85 % of the cities, we measured an increase of vegetation greenness along with urban growth. In addition, our detailed results allow quantifying the impact of urbanization in Chinese cities on vegetation protection and sustainable development.
