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Evaluating the effect of plain afforestation project and future spatial suitability in Beijing

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Abstract

Taking the “One Million-Mu (666 km2)” Plain Afforestation (Phase I) Project (Phase I afforestation) in Beijing city as an example, we monitored the growth status of planted forest using long-term remote sensing images, and evaluated the impacts of afforestation on land use change and vegetation growth. We found there is a large space for improvement regarding the ecological benefits of the project. Moreover, we found forest patches with decreasing greenness after the afforestation were mainly converted from farmland with high greenness and low heterogeneity in terms of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). This implies that those farmland patches are inappropriate for afforestation. According to the results from Phase I afforestation and the impact of urbanization on green space, we constructed a series of spatial variables and generated a suitability map for the next “New Round of One Million-Mu (666 km2) Afforestation project” (Phase II afforestation). We then modeled the spatial distribution of Phase II afforestation based on the derived suitability map. This study is crucial for the scientific evaluation of afforestation projects for space planning (e.g., urban green space planning). The evaluation and modeling framework built in this study can be used to support the decision making and policy implementation of afforestation projects in China.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by the National Key R & D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0600104), and donations from Delos Living LLC and the Cyrus Tang Foundation to Tsinghua University.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design, Beijing, 100045, China

    Tengyun Hu, Wencheng Yu & Xiaochun Huang

  2. Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences, Iowa State University, Ames, 50011, USA

    Xuecao Li

  3. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Peng Gong

  4. Tsinghua Urban Institute, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Peng Gong

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  1. Tengyun Hu
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  2. Xuecao Li
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  3. Peng Gong
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  4. Wencheng Yu
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  5. Xiaochun Huang
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Correspondence to Peng Gong.

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Hu, T., Li, X., Gong, P. et al. Evaluating the effect of plain afforestation project and future spatial suitability in Beijing. Sci. China Earth Sci. 63, 1587–1598 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-019-9636-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-019-9636-0

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