With the rapid development of cities, the way that people commute has changed greatly, meanwhile, people turn to require more on physical and psychological aspects in the contemporary world. However, the current urban road landscape ignores these changes, for example, those road landscape elements are boring, confusing, fragmented and lack of integrity and hierarchy. Under such current situatio...

The gradient based landscape metrics analysis is now widely used to study the landscape pattern change in respond to urbanization. In order to discover the Beijing metropolitan area landscape pattern spatial and temporal change trends during the past 15 years, several landscape metrics are computed along a 96 km long transect crossing Beijing metropolitan area from west to east. Specially, the ...

Change detection is the process of identifying differences in the state of objects and/or phenomena under consideration by observing them at different times. Change detection is important for monitoring and managing natural resources, urban development, environmental changes, and disaster assessments. Recent advances in satellite imagery, in terms of improved spatial and temporal resolutions, a...

The wildland–urban interface represents landscape change—changes brought about by urbanization, by shifts in forest management, and altered disturbance regimes, each having ecological, social, and economic ramifications. In this chapter, I will focus on some of the ecological ramifications associated with landscape change, primarily forest fragmentation and deforestation, resulting from urbaniz...

Urban planners and ecologists have long debated the relationship between the structure of urban landscapes and social activities. There have, however, been very few discussions as to whether any such relationships might depend on the scales of observation. This work applies a hierarchical zoning technique to data from the city of Quito, Ecuador, to examine how relationships between typical spat...

Urbanization has profound influences on ecological communities, but our understanding of causal mechanisms is limited by a lack of attention to its component stressors. Published research suggests that at landscape scales, habitat loss and fragmentation are the major drivers of community change, whereas at local scales, human activity and vegetation management are the primary stressors. Little ...

As a local environmental issue with global importance, land use/land cover change (LUCC) has always been one of the key issues in geography and environmental studies with the expansion of regional case studies. While most of LUCC studies in China have focused on urban land use change, meanwhile, compared with the rapid change of urban land use in the coastal areas of eastern China, slow but dis...

Rapid urbanization has accelerated land use and land cover changes, and generated the urban heat island effect (UHI). Previous studies have reported positive effects of neighborhood landscapes on mitigating urban surface temperatures. However, the influence of neighborhood landscape spatial patterns on enhancing cooling effects has not yet been fully investigated. The main objective of this stu...

Periodic monitoring and multi-scale characterization of urban sprawl is essential for improving urban planning and development. However, historical sprawl analysis is not well suited for the neourbanization occurring in most cities in China due to the limited data available. This paper proposes a concise and cost-effective method for automating the extraction of urban boundaries (UBs). The meth...