Quantitatively Assessing Ecological Stress of Urbanization on Natural Ecosystems by Using a Landscape-Adjacency Index

• Main Authors: Meixia Lin, Tao Lin, Laurence Jones, Xiaofang Liu, Li Xing, Jinling Sui, Junmao Zhang, Hong Ye, Yuqin Liu, Guoqin Zhang, Xin Lu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-04-01
• Series: Remote Sensing
• Subjects: landscape-adjacency degree; urban expansion; ecological stress; land use; Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomerations
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/13/7/1352

Urban spatial expansion poses a threat to regional ecosystems and biodiversity directly through altering the size, shape, and interconnectivity of natural landscapes. Monitoring urban spatial expansion using traditional area-based metrics from remote sensing provides a feasible way to quantify this regional ecological stress. However, variation in landscape-adjacency relationships (i.e., the adjacency between individual landscape classes) caused by urban expansion is often overlooked. In this study, a novel edge-based index (landscape-adjacency index, <i>LAdI</i>) was proposed based on the spatial-adjacency relationship between landscape patches to measure the regional ecological stress of urban expansion on natural landscapes. Taking the entire Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomerations (YRD) as a study area, we applied the <i>LAdI</i> for individual landscape classes (<i>V_i</i>) and landscape level (<i>LV</i>) to quantitatively assess change over time in the ecological stress of YRD from 1990 to 2015 at two spatial scales: municipal scale and 5 km-grid scale. The results showed that the vulnerable zones (<i>LV</i> ≥ 0.6) were mainly distributed in the north of the YRD, and cultivated land was the most vulnerable natural landscape (<i>V_i</i> ≥ 0.6) at the 5 km-grid scale. The most vulnerable landscape at the municipal scale was cultivated land in 19 of 26 cities in each period, and that in the remaining 7 cities varied at distinct urbanization stages. We used scatter diagrams and Pearson correlation analysis to compare the edge-based <i>LAdI</i> with an area-based index (percent of built-up area, <i>PB</i>) and found that: <i>LV</i> and <i>PB</i> had a significant positive correlation at both the municipal scale and 5 km-grid scale. But there were multiple <i>LV</i>s with different values corresponding to one <i>PB</i> with the same value at the 5 km-grid scale. Both indexes could represent the degree of urban expansion; however, the edge-based metric better quantified ecological stress under different urban-sprawl patterns sharing the same percent of built-up area. As changes in land use affect both the size and edge effect among landscape patches, the area-based <i>PB</i> and the edge-based <i>LAdI</i> should be applied together when assessing the ecological stress caused by urbanization.