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Global analysis and simulation of land-use change associated with urbanization

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Abstract

A combination of rapid population growth and an accelerating demographic shift from rural to urbanized habitats has resulted in urbanization becoming an increasingly global phenomenon. Two alternate hypotheses describing urban landscape trajectories suggest urbanization is either leading to more homogeneous global patterns or urbanization has dichotomous trajectories of increasing dispersal or coalescence. To better understand the global variation in urban land-cover patterns and trajectories we described the variation in urban landscape structure for 120 cities distributed throughout the world assessed at circa 1990 and 2000. We coupled these data to a low-dimensional neighborhood based model of urban growth using a data-model fusion approach. Trajectories of urban growth were assessed using both the original data and model projections to 2030. The patterns of landscape change were related to both the rate of growth and income. The historical patterns of change showed a trend of increasing landscape complexity and this trend was projected to continue. Urban rate of growth was closely related to the change in several landscape metrics. Income was associated with landscape dynamics and this effect interacted with city size. Large cities were less sensitive to the income effect than small cities. Along with changes to the magnitude of each metric, the overall variation in metrics between years generally exhibited a decrease in variability and this variability was projected to continue decreasing. These findings supported the hypothesis that urban landscapes are becoming more homogeneous and that the dispersal-coalescing dichotomy represent endpoints rather than alternate states of urban growth.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the organizers and participants of the Second International Young Scientists’ Global Change Conference, System for Analysis, Research, and Training meeting held in Beijing, China where the ideas for this analysis were first generated. We greatly appreciate the work and openness by Shlomo (Solly) Angel who has made the urban land-cover data publically available. GDJ was supported by NSF grants 0814692 and 0919006.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

    G. Darrel Jenerette

  2. Center for Conservation Biology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

    G. Darrel Jenerette

  3. Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    David Potere

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Correspondence to G. Darrel Jenerette.

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Darrel Jenerette, G., Potere, D. Global analysis and simulation of land-use change associated with urbanization. Landscape Ecol 25, 657–670 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-010-9457-2

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