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Quantifying the speed, growth modes, and landscape pattern changes of urbanization: a hierarchical patch dynamics approach

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Abstract

Urbanization transforms landscape structure and profoundly affects biodiversity and ecological processes. To understand and solve these ecological problems, at least three aspects of spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization need to be quantified: the speed, urban growth modes, and resultant changes in landscape pattern. In this study, we quantified these spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization in the central Yangtze River Delta region, China from 1979 to 2008, based on a hierarchical patch dynamics framework that guided the research design and the analysis with landscape metrics. Our results show that the urbanized area in the study region increased exponentially during the 30 years at the county, prefectural, and regional levels, with increasing speed down the urban hierarchy. Three growth modes—infilling, edge-expanding, and leapfrogging—operated concurrently and their relative dominance shifted over time. As urbanization progressed, patch density and edge density generally increased, and the connectivity of urban patches in terms of the average nearest neighbor distance also increased. While landscape-level structural complexity also tended to increase, the shape of individual patches became increasingly regular. Our results suggest that whether urban landscapes are becoming more homogenous or heterogeneous may be dependent on scale in time and space as well as landscape metrics used. The speed, growth modes, and landscape pattern are related to each other in complicated fashions. This complex relationship can be better understood by conceptualizing urbanization not simply as a dichotomous diffusion-coalescence switching process, but as a spiraling process of shifting dominance among multiple growth modes: the wax and wane of infilling, edge-expansion, and leapfrog across the landscape.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported in part by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30770384), Chinese Ministry of Education (No. 106079), and State Eleventh Five-Year ‘‘211 Project’’ to East China Normal University. We thank H. Niu for his assistance with LUCC data, and G. Sun and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

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Author notes

  1. Cheng Li

    Present address: Guangdong Institute of Eco-Environment and Soil Sciences, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510650, China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Cheng Li & Junxiang Li

  2. Shanghai Key Laboratory of Urbanization and Ecological Restoration, Shanghai, 200062, China

    Junxiang Li

  3. School of Life Sciences and Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, 85287, USA

    Jianguo Wu

  4. Center for Human-Environment System Sustainability (CHESS), State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology (ESPRE), Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Jianguo Wu

Authors
  1. Cheng Li
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  2. Junxiang Li
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  3. Jianguo Wu
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Correspondence to Junxiang Li.

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Li, C., Li, J. & Wu, J. Quantifying the speed, growth modes, and landscape pattern changes of urbanization: a hierarchical patch dynamics approach. Landscape Ecol 28, 1875–1888 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-013-9933-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-013-9933-6

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