Monitoring urbanization in China using moderate resolution satellite data

Abstract

Rapid urbanization in China attracted a large amount of attention in the last twenty years. It is crucial to monitor the process of rapid urbanization at large scale for more informed urban planning and management. In this paper, we introduce a map dataset of urban areas in China derived from moderate resolution remotely sensed data in 1990s, 2000s and 2010s which has consistently been done by the same group, with the same method, using the same data type, and checked and refined by a unified protocol. For comparisons, the dataset was adjusted to increase the compatibility with official statistical reports. The comparison between remote sensing map and statistical datasets for 294 cities showed that 34%, 29%, and 30% percent of cities have an area differences within 20% during the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, respectively, which suggested that the agreement between the results from remote sensing and the statistical report was low. We also analyzed the urban expansion rate over the last twenty years, as well as the fastest and slowest expansion cities. The results showed that the cities in Northeastern provinces didn't expand as much as the coastal cities. The newly created urban expansion dataset can be useful in many fields including trend analysis of urbanization in China, simulation of urban development dynamics, analysis of the relationship among urbanization as well as land use, urban planning and management.