Impacts of Transportation Arteries on Land Use Patterns in Urbanrural Fringe: A Comparative Gradient Analysis of Qixia District, Nanjing City, China

Integrated transportation and land use studies are of major interest to planners because they consider the interaction between transportation development and land use change. Quantifying the impact of transport infrastructure on land use change is necessary for evaluating the role of transportation development in the process of land use and land cover change in the urban-rural fringe. Taking Qixia District of Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province, China as a typical urban-rural fringe area, this paper analyzes the patterns and charac- teristics of land use change along three major transportation arteries using land use data from 2000 and 2008. We examine the spatial differentiation and gradient of land use pattern around railway, expressway, and highway corridors to investigate whether land use change in the urban-rural fringe is related to distance from transportation arteries and to clarify the varying impacts of different forms of transport infrastructure on land use patterns. We find that construction land generally tends to be located close to major transportation arteries, and that railways have the most obvious influence on land use change in the urban-rural fringe, while the impact of expressways was not significant. We conclude that there exists a causal relationship between the presence of transportation arteries and land use change in the urban-rural fringe, but this relationship varies across different types of linear transnort infrastrncnlre.

Land use and landscape pattern change: a linkage to the construction of the Qinghai-Xizang Highway

Based on digital land use data from 1995 to 2000 and road data, the land use and landscape changes of Golmud, Qumaleb and Zhidoi are studied on a macro-scale. Land use and landscape changes in highway buffer zones and city expansion are special subjects. A new formula is used to define the exact degree of dynamic land use. To adequately define land use and landscape pattern changes, the buffer zones, illustrating the changes at different distances from the road, are recognized with ArcGIS 8.1 software. Prominent changes took place in land use and landscape patterns from 1995 to 2000, and the area of built-up land increased by 323.8%. The comprehensive degree of dynamic land use is 2.25, and the degree of dynamic land use of built-up land is the highest, followed by cultivated land. Woodland has the lowest value. The used degree index of land resources declined by 38.8 from 1995 to 2000. Landscape changed dramatically which influenced ecological processes immensely. Different from the corridor effect of other traffic routes, the corridor effect of this section of road is not obvious and its “point” radiation effect can be easily seen. The expanding range of Golmud City is confined to a 3 km buffer, while for Wudaoliang, it is 1 km. No land use change happened in the Nanshankou buffer.

Dynamic Changes of the Bush Encroachment in Low Altitude Area of Ethiopia

Bush encroachment is widely distributed in arid and semi-arid regions, and it has a serious impact on livestock production, especially in Africa where livestock is a primary source for the livelihoods of many people. In this study, methods of supervised classification and decision tree classification, and indexes of a land use change significance index（Ci） and a single land use dynamic degree, were applied to remote sensing imagery of Ethiopia for 1986–2016. The results show the dynamic characteristics of grassland bush encroachment in low altitude areas（pastures 1500 m above sea level） of Ethiopia in the 30 year period studied. The results revealed several interesting features of this phenomenon.（1） The area of bush encroachment showed an increasing trend, with a maximum of 3.74×10^3 km^2 in 2003, which represented 68.97% of the total area, and declined slightly from 2003~2016.（2） Among classification types, the area of severe shrub grassland was the largest, accounting for 28.36–49.10% of the total area, while the area of moderate bush encroachment accounted for 9.77–16.68%, and slight bush encroachment accounted for 5.52–7.57%.（3） The expansion rate of shrubby grassland was 0.74% for the 30 year period, while the average annual expansion rate was 2.16% for the 8 years from 1995–2003.（4） Forest land and grassland were the two main land use types of shrub grassland transformation in low altitude areas and bush encroachment changed large amounts of forest land into grassland due to shrub grassland management. The results of this study provide basic data for revealing the impacts of development processes on subsequent bush encroachment and can inform better management for the sustainable development of grasslands in low altitude systems.