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Spatiotemporal pattern of urbanization in Shanghai, China between 1989 and 2005

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Abstract

Quantifying the spatiotemporal pattern of urbanization is necessary to understand urban morphology and its impacts on biodiversity and ecological processes, and thus can provide essential information for improving landscape and urban planning. Recent studies have suggested that, as cities evolve, certain general patterns emerge along the urban–rural gradient although individual cities always differ in details. To help better understand these generalities and idiosyncrasies in urbanization patterns, we analyzed the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Shanghai metropolitan area from 1989 to 2005, based on landscape metrics and remote sensing data. Specifically, the main objectives of our study were to quantitatively characterize the spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization in Shanghai in recent decades, identify possible spatial signatures of different land use types, and test the diffusion coalescence hypotheses of urban growth. We found that, similar to numerous cities around the world reported in previous studies, urbanization increased the diversity, fragmentation, and configurational complexity of the urban landscape of Shanghai. In the same time, however, the urban–rural patterns of several land use types in Shanghai seem unique—quite different from previously reported patterns. For most land use types, each showed a distinctive spatial pattern along a rural–urban transect, as indicated by landscape metrics. Furthermore, the urban expansion of Shanghai exhibited an outward wave-like pattern. Our results suggest that the urbanization of Shanghai followed a complex diffusion–coalescence pattern along the rural–urban transect and in time.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Yujie Wang, Tong Wu, Ying Zhu, Chen Meng, Sanping Gao, Mingce Xu, Rong Li, Cheng Li, and Hai Qin for their assistance in digitizing the land use data and field investigations. This research was supported in part by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30770384), Chinese Ministry of Education (No. 106079) to J. Li, and the State-Eleventh-Five-Years “211 Project” Key Discipline of Ecology to East China Normal University.

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Li, J., Li, C., Zhu, F. et al. Spatiotemporal pattern of urbanization in Shanghai, China between 1989 and 2005. Landscape Ecol 28, 1545–1565 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-013-9901-1

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