Landscape Patterns And Dynamics In Rapid Urbanization Processes In Pudong New District, Shanghai From 1989 To 2000

With the world population increasing, a worldwide urbanization is accelerating especially in developing countries. Urbanization has profoundly changed natural landscapes throughout the world, which inevitably has resulted in various impacts on the structure, function and dynamics of ecosystems at a wide range of scales. The consequences of the urbanization such as population expansion, lack of land resources, traffic congestion and degradation of the environment, have brought great challenges to the sustainable development of the city. Quantifying the urban landscape patterns and its dynamics is significant for understanding ecological processes and consequences of the urbanization, and is very important to the researches in urban morphology, urban growth and urban ecological constructions.Landscape metrics combined with gradient analysis, and transition matrix were employed to analyze the landscape patterns and its changes during rapid urbanization processes in Pudong New District, ShangHai, based upon the land-use datasets derived from high solution aerial photos of 1989 (1:20000), 1994 (1:60000) and 2000 (1:50000), respectively.The results demonstrated that: l)the landscape patterns of Pudong New District have changed dramatically in its ever-increasing urbanization from 1989 to 2000, the urbanization rate had increased from 23.3% to 43.1%; 2) There were two stages were checked in the processes of urbanization in Pudong New District, the first Stage was from 1989 to 1994, in which a lot of natural or semi-natural landscapes were exploited rapidly and urban expansion was out-of-order, the second stage was from 1994 to 2000, in which the urbanization is accelerated indicative of increased urban landscape areas, facilitated urban infrastructure and ameliorated urban environment compared with the first stage; 3)...