Urbanization is found to be closely associated with land use/land cover change which has an important influence in our environment and ecosystems, such as urban heat island effect, biodiversity loss, soil erosion, and pollutions. Studies on accurately simulating urban expansion have been inspired by increasing concerns of the sustainability of urban development. This paper reports our research ...

Chinese cities are experiencing rapid urban expansion and being transformed into more dispersed urban form which necessitate the quantification of fine-scale intra-urban characteristics for sustainable urban development. We propose an integrated multi-level and multi-dimensional method to characterize urban sprawl and apply it to Wuhan, a typical metropolitan area in central China from 1996 to ...

Driven by rising income and urban population growth, China has experienced rapid urban expansion since the 1980s. Urbanization can have positive effects on the urban environment; however, improvement of urban environment quality, especially its divergence between relatively developed and undeveloped cities in China, is currently a rather rudimentary and subjective issue. This study analyzed urb...

Studies of urbanization effects in Chinese cities from the aspect of the coupled development of economy and environment are rare due to data limitations. This paper studied Shanghai’s fast urban expansion and examined the dynamic relationship between economic growth and environment consequences at the district level. We extracted data on urban built-up area and land surface temperature from rem...

This study examines the temporal and spatial changes in land use as aconsequence of rapid urban development in the city of Beijing. Using a combination oftechniques of remote sensing and GIS, the study identifies a substantial loss of plaindryland and a phenomenal expansion of urban construction land over the recent decade.Geographically, there is a clear shifting of urban construction land fro...

Many Indian capitals are rapidly becoming megacities due to industrialization and rural–urban emigration. Land use within city boundaries has changed dynamically, accommodating development while replacing traditional land-use patterns. Using Landsat-8 and IRS-P6 data, this study investigated land-use changes in urban and peri-urban Hyderabad and their influence on land-use and land-cover. Advan...

Many studies have reported the thermal effects of urban expansion from non-built-up land; however, how changes in building height in built-up land influence the regional thermal environment is still uncertain. Thus, taking the transitional region between the Chinese megacities of Beijing and Tianjin as the study area, this study investigated the impacts of built-up land expansion in 2D and 3D o...

Modeling results incorporating several distinct urban expansion futures for the United States in 2100 show that, in the absence of any adaptive urban design, megapolitan expansion, alone and separate from greenhouse gas-induced forcing, can be expected to raise near-surface temperatures 1-2 °C not just at the scale of individual cities but over large regional swaths of the country. This warming...