Abstract
Shenzhen, located in South China has experienced rapid urbanization over the past three decades. This paper focuses on the urban sprawl integrating remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS). The overlay of the urban area maps for two adjacent study years was used to generate the sprawl categories map. The three main sprawl categories of infilling sprawl, edge-expansion sprawl and outlying sprawl were calculated and analyzed in regard to their distribution and change throughout different counties during the study years. The result showed that the urban area in the study region had increased dramatically from 19.55 km2 in 1979 to 894.31 km2 in 2005. The urban area centroids over the six study years transferred from southwest to northeast from 1979 to 2005. Among the study counties, the patterns of sprawl categories were markedly distinctive over different study periods. From 1979 to 2005, Shenzhen’s chief spread was outlying sprawl. Bao’an experienced the maximum sprawl within the three study counties. The findings show that studying urban sprawl can provide a method of monitoring urban area change, which, in turn, gives us a clearer perspective of urban sprawl patterns over a longer period of time. This would prove invaluable to those researchers such as land and urban planners.
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Acknowledgments
This research was in part supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 5006700; No. 40871229). We would especially like to thank the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research and Guangdong Institute of Eco-environment and Soil Science for their hard work in the basic data preparation. The insightful and constructive comments of the reviewers are appreciated.
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Lv, Zq., Wu, Zf., Wei, Jb. et al. Monitoring of the urban sprawl using geoprocessing tools in the Shenzhen Municipality, China. Environ Earth Sci 62, 1131–1141 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-010-0602-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-010-0602-7