Paper Info
Title
Using landscape indicators and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the optimum spatial scale of urban land use patterns in Wuhan, China.
Abstract
Quantifying land use patterns and functions is critical for modeling urban ecological processes, and an emerging challenge is to apply models at multiple spatial scales. Methods of determining the optimum scale of land use patterns are commonly considered using landscape metrics. Landscape metrics are quantitative indicators for analyzing landscape heterogeneity at the landscape level. In this study, due to their widespread use in urban landscape analyses and well-documented effectiveness in quantifying landscape patterns, landscape metrics that represent dominance, shape, fragmentation and connectivity were selected. Five metrics include Patch Density, Contagion, Landscape Shape Index, Aggregation Index and Connectivity. Despite a wide application of landscape metrics for land use studies, the majority mainly focuses on the qualitative analysis of the characteristics of landscape metrics. The previous models are limited in exploring the optimum scale of land use patterns for their lack of quantitation. Therefore, taking the City of Wuhan as an example, the land use unit was treated as a patch, and the landscape pattern metrics at different spatial scales were calculated and compared so as to find the optimum one. Furthermore, a mathematical model of landscape metrics was proposed to quantify the scale effect of urban land use patterns, generating a complementary tool to select the optimum scale. In addition, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was introduced to determine the respective weights of the chosen landscape metrics in this model. Fractal dimension was ultimately applied to verify the chosen optimum scale of our study region. The results indicated that 60 m is confirmed to be the optimum scale for capturing the spatial variability of land use patterns in this study area.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s12145-018-0348-4
Earth Science Informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Urban land use patterns,Optimum scale,Landscape metrics,Analytic hierarchy process,Fractal dimension
Data mining,Scale effect,Environmental resource management,Shape index,Fractal dimension,Computer science,Fragmentation (computing),Spatial variability,Spatial ecology,Analytic hierarchy process,Land use
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
11
4
1865-0473
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
3
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qiuping Huang100.34
Jiejun Huang243.12
Yunjun Zhan302.37
Wei Cui4145.29
Yanbin Yuan514017.67