Urban expansion displays varied spatial characteristics in different periods of urban agglomeration development. Studying the spatial and temporal patterns of urban expansion from the perspective of urban agglomeration is important for understanding the complex relationship between urban expansion and network structure of urban agglomerations. In this study we analyzed urban expansion in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration based on road network, a gravity model, and a space syntax model. Construction land expansion was obtained from Landsat remote sensing data in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 and then was used to calculate intensity and speed of urban expansion. Position of cities in the traffic network of the urban agglomeration was analyzed by accessibility to and spatial interaction intensity of core cities. The space syntax model was used to compute accessibility of the road network and the status of a city in the network of the urban agglomeration. The results show that, first, urban expansion intensity displayed a positive correlation with accessibility to core cities, spatial interaction intensity of core cities, and space syntax indicators. Second, there was a positive correlation between urban expansion velocity and indicators identified above in the first (1980-1990) and second (1990-2000) periods. However, it exhibited a negative correlation in the third period (2000-2010). Cities with a relatively poor interconnectivity of traffic network and located in the periphery of the urban agglomeration developed more quickly in the last time period, displaying a trend of spatial convergence. This study shows that spatial linkage played an important but evolving role in urban expansion within the urban agglomeration of the Yangtze River Delta. In addition, it serves as a reference for the planning of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration and the regulation of urban expansion of other urban agglomerations.
Ecological footprint analysis is an important method of sustainability assessment. Three-dimensional ecological footprint model (3DEF) can distinguish and track the occupation of natural capital stock and the consumption of natural capital flows, and consequently elucidating the core issues of sustainable development. To date, studies that apply the 3DEF method for the evaluation of sustainable utilization of natural capital are relatively few and mainly concerned with the global or the national scale. Taking the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region as the study area, this research evaluated natural capital utilization sustainability based on a 3DEF model at the scale of metropolitan region. Using statistical data in 2010, this research first calculated the ecological footprint depth (EFdepth) and footprint size (EFsize) of 13 cities. It then, analyzed the difference in the composition of the 13 cities' EFdepth and EFsize, as well as its influencing factors and examined the pattern of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan region's natural capital use in 2010. Lastly, it examined the ecological sustainability status of this metropolitan region. The main conclusions of the study are as follows: Ecological deficit is prevalent in the 13 cities of the metropolitan region. EFdepth is deeply influenced by the amount and structure of fossil energy consumption. The relationship between EFdepth and economic development may be described by the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) with an inverted N shape. According to the relationship between the depletion of stocks and the appropriation of flows, the 13 cities in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Metropolitan region are divided into four categories, namely, the depletion of stocks is seriously, significantly, or generally ahead of the appropriation of flows, and the average level of the depletion of stocks and the appropriation of flows are the same. The ecological sustainability status of these four types of cities is, respectively, the weakest, weaker, stronger, and the strongest. The results presenting the natural capital utilization at the metropolitan region scale based on the 3DEF model are better than that with traditional ecological footprint model method.
As one type of meteorological disasters, heat waves have exerted great influences on human production, life, and health. In order to explore the differences of heat wave vulnerability between coastal and inland cities and its formation mechanism, a heat wave Vulnerability Scoping Diagram (VSD) is constructed in this article, which includes three dimensions—exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability. Using the daily extreme highest temperature data from 1994 to 2013 and economic and social statistics, the heat wave vulnerability and its three dimensions, i.e. exposure, sensitivity and adaptability, are assessed and compared respectively between Fuzhou and Nanping, which are located in the coastal and inland area of Fujian Province. It is attempted to explain the vulnerability differences between coastal and inland areas. The result shows that: heat wave vulnerability of the coastal and inland areas had significant differences due to their geographical and socioeconomic differences, and vulnerability to heat waves in the coastal region was lower than that of the inland area in the last 20 years. However, the rising vulnerability of the former may surpass that of the latter in the future as a result of economic development in the coastal area that leads to increased sensitivity. Environmental impact of human activities is relatively weak in the inland region, and vulnerability to heat waves will decrease slowly because of decreasing sensitivity and increasing adaptation. The key to reduce vulnerability to heat waves is to enhance regional adaptability and reduce sensitivity at the same time. This has important implications for designing effective polices.
Supporting national development by innovation is China's inevitable choice in the new normal economic development environment. In this study, the data of innovation capacity of 30 provinces (municipalities, autonomous regions) from 2000 to 2014 were selected to construct panel datasets, and linear weighted synthesis method, coefficient of variation, Gini coefficient, spatial autocorrelation, NICH index, and macro analysis method, combined with GIS spatial analysis and SPSS data analysis tools were used to explore the spatiotemporal change and influencing factors of innovation capacity in China. The results shows that: (1) In 2000-2014, innovation capacity in China increased year by year, from 0.199 in 2000 to 1.775 in 2014. Knowledge innovation capacity and technology innovation capacity improved faster as compared to government support and service capacities and the basic environment of innovation. (2) Difference in regional innovation capacity shifted from great gap at an overall low capacity level to small gap at and overall high capacity level. High capacity and faster growing areas are mainly concentrated in Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangzhou, and other eastern coastal provinces (municipalities). Guizhou, Yunnan, Gansu, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and other provinces (municipalities, autonomous regions) in the southwestern and northwestern regions have relatively low level of innovation capacity and slow growth. (3) Regional material wealth concentration, regional intellectual capital agglomeration, regional innovation environment, and global knowledge spillover are the main factors that affect the change of China's innovation capacity. The research results provide some guidance for the improvement of China's innovation capacity and regional sustainable development.
Using panel data of Chinese provinces for the period 2003-2012, this article investigates the spatial distribution of high-tech industry innovation by applying the global difference index and kernel density estimation, and analyzes its influencing factors with spatial econometric models. The results show that: There are striking regional disparities in high-tech industry innovation, and the innovation level in the eastern area is significantly higher than the central and western areas. During the period from 2003 to 2012, regional disparity of high-tech industry innovation showed a narrowing tendency after the initial expansion, and the spatial distribution of regional innovation showed a trend from agglomeration to spreading. A clear spillover of innovation between adjacent provinces is verified by this study. Research and development (R & D) capital, R & D personnel, university research, size of high-tech firms, and openness of the market are all positively related to high-tech industry innovation. R & D personnel inputs and openness of the market can benefit neighboring regions as well, but the size of firm has a negative influence on regions with close geographic proximity. We propose that strengthening the inputs of R & D capitals and R & D personnel in western and central China, emphasizing the role that university plays in the development of innovation, breaking regional barriers for facilitating technology flow, and promoting the openness of the market are beneficial for increasing the overall innovation level and reducing regional differences.
Natural rubber is one of the four main raw materials (steel, petroleum, coal, and rubber) of industry and a globally important strategic material. Using concentration index and two-way analysis of variance method and the rubber production data of 1961-2013 at provincial, national and global scales from the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT), we quantified the spatial and temporal patterns and change of rubber production and investigated the main influencing factors of these changes. The results show that: (1) Since 1961, the global total rubber production has achieved great development, showing an overall increasing trend. The rubber production of the major rubber-producing countries of Asian (MRPCA) accounted for more than 90% of global output, with a clear multi-stage growth trend in 1961-2013. (2) Spatially, rubber production showed a concentrated pattern in the MRPCA, especially in Southeast Asia, including the most concentrated countries of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The disparities of national rubber production were significant among the MRPCA and the gaps further expanded during this time period. (3) The main factor affecting rubber production was plantation area. But in a few countries such as China and Thailand, rubber production was mainly impacted by rubber yield. (4) Global rubber production changes from "big three (Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia)" to a "dual core (Thailand and Indonesia)" distribution. Rubber plantations of the MRPCA generally expanded northward from the countries of island Southeast Asia to the counterparts in mainland Southeast Asia. The latter has become an advantage region in major rubber producing area of the world that shows great potential.
Allocating land resources through comprehensive consolidation of hollowing villages to realize an improved spatial configuration of rural regions is crucial to integrated rural-urban development. In this article, we summarized the contents of hollowing village consolidation and rural land resource allocation; clarified the inter-relationship between new urbanization, rural restructuring, hollowing village consolidation, and rural land resource allocation; identified three types of land resource allocation; and finally analyzed the mechanisms and institutions of rural land resource allocation. The results show that: The essence of hollowing village consolidation is to realize efficient circulation and optimized allocation of factors, including rural land, production, and livelihood factors. Rural restructuring provides the theoretical foundation for hollowing village consolidation, and the latter is a driving force to realize rural restructuring. Under the background of new urbanization, hollowing village consolidation is an important content to realize urbanization. New urbanization is a policy thrust of rural restructuring and the latter offers a method to realize new urbanization. Market is decisive in rural land resource allocation. Appropriate institutions are needed to reform and improve land resource allocation, including land expropriation, transfer of land use rights, transfer of homestead, and exit of land from rural land use. These institutions and a well-developed social security system will help improve the efficiency of rural land resource allocation.
Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method has been widely applied to measure sustainability of agricultural land use by determining the weight of each evaluation factor. Delphi method was often used in existing AHP-based weight calculation of the evaluation factors. Delphi method is built on an expert weighting model and therefore difficult to avoid subjective judgment of experts. In this article, a modified AHP method is proposed to calculate the weight of each evaluation factor using the Grey Relation Analysis (GRA) method to solve the problem in using the Delphi method. Using Zaoyang City, a representative area in agricultural land use in northern Hubei Province, China, as the case study area, an evaluation system of sustainable agriculture land use was first established considering a hierarchy of levels including goals, rules, and criteria. The rule level consists of four aspects: agriculture land output sustainability, resource input sustainability, ecological sustainability, and socioeconomic sustainability. Second, experts chose one characteristic factor at the criterion level for each rule element to constitute reference variable sequence and the other factors in the same rule level to constitute comparative variable sequence in GRA. Third, grey relation coefficients were calculated between the characteristic factor and the other factors in the corresponding comparative variable sequence. In constructing a pairwise comparison matrix, experts gave each factor at criterion level a dominant value between 1 and 9 based on the grey relation coefficients. Then calculations were performed to find the satisfactory maximum Eigen value, consistency index CI, consistency ratio CR, and lastly, vectors of weights for factors at the criterion level were obtained, reflecting the relative importance of the various factors to the goal hierarchy in the AHP. Using the weights resulted from this procedure, sustainability of agricultural land use in Zaoyang City was calculated using a Multi-Objective Liner Functions Comprehensive Evaluation (MOLFCV) model, and the obstacles to sustainable agricultural land use in the city were identified. The results show that the sustainability of comprehensive land use of the city increased from 2001 to 2012 while the ecological sustainability of agriculture land resource use was strongly lower than the socioeconomic sustainability since 2006. The reason directly lies in the increasing use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides and the continual decline of annual precipitation in the farmland area. However, it was the lack of awareness and priority of ecological environment protection in the local agricultural land use that resulted in lower ecological sustainability than economic and social sustainability of agricultural land use in Zaoyang City. Moreover, obstacles for sustainable agriculture land use in Zaoyang City included suboptimal total agricultural output per hectare of land, per capita area of cultivated land, amount of fertilizer applied per hectare of cultivated land, effective irrigated area, annual precipitation, per capita GDP, and net income of rural households.
At present, the research of agent-based modeling (ABM), which considers farming households' bounded rational behavior and uses simulation platform to simulate farming households' land use behavior, has become a focus of land use and land cover change simulation. Based on the beliefs-desires-intention (BDI) model, this study constructed a bounded rationality-resources (CR-BDI) model. A case study was conducted for Jiangxingzhuang Village of Mizhi County in Shaanxi Province. To verify the effectiveness of the CR-BDI model, a comparison between CR-BDI and BDI modeling results was performed. A number of observations and conclusions can be drawn: (1) Compared to the BDI model, a more realistic representation of farming households' decision-making process was provided by the CR-BDI model. The simulation accuracy of the CR-BDI model of 2014 is 93.22%, 8.48% higher than that of the traditional BDI model. The spatial distribution accuracy of the CR-BDI model output is 10.1% higher than that of the traditional BDI model. The simulated results of all crops (except scallion) in the CR-BDI model were of higher accuracy than in the BDI model. In 2015, the spatial accuracy of the CR-BDI model output is 78.8%, 9.6% higher than that of the traditional BDI model. (2) The indicator of CR is suitable for reflecting the bounded rationality of farming households, and matches the actual planting decision of farming households better. (3) The NetLogo platform is useful for representing farming households' land use behavior and provides a new way to research land use and land cover change.
The well-being of the human race is closely related to the ecological environment. In the past few decades, indicators retrieved from remote sensing data have been increasingly more widely applied to ecological environment evaluation for their advantages of spatial visualization, and remote sensing technology offers important reference to regional ecological environment management, improvement, and development planning by quickly assessing regional ecological environment quality. Remote sensing ecological index (RSEI), constructed by four indicators including green degree, humidity degree, heat degree, and dry degree retrieved from remote sensing images, can reflect ecological environment status. RSEI is based on real-time remote sensing images and accordingly more capable of quick evaluation of temporal and spatial changes of ecological environment quality. In this article, Landsat5 TM images from 1995 and 2007 and Landsat8 OLI images from 2015 were used as data source to retrieve values of the four indicators to construct the RSEI by the principal component analysis method, and Changbai Mountain Nature Reserve ecological environment quality from 1995 to 2015 was evaluated using the RSEI. The result shows: (1) The green degree and humidity degree have an positive effect on promoting the ecological environment quality of the region while the heat degree and dry degree have a restraining effect on the regional ecological environment quality, and the humidity degree is more significant than the other three indicators. (2) In this region, the proportion of excellent and good RSEI classes accounted for 49.5%, 66.5%, and 76.2% of the total area in 1995, 2007, and 2015. Meanwhile, the degenerated, unchanged, and improved RSEI classes were 3.9%, 55.6%, and 40.5% of the total area respectively, indicating that the overall ecological environment quality has gradually improved. To some extent this is attributed to the Natural Forest Resources Protection Project and a series of ecological conservation measures taken in the Changbai Mountain Nature Reserve area. Although the overall ecological environment quality of the study area has gradually improved, the ecological environment quality around Tianchi has declined. This area has a relatively fragile ecological environment and suffers from high intensity of tourism activities. The decline in ecological environment quality may be attributed to the increasingly intense tourism activities. (3) The stepwise regression analysis results show that each of the selected indicators is key to indicating the ecological environment quality, and the model prediction result reveals that the control of barren and dry surfaces is a critical step for improving the ecological environment quality.
China's urban transformation has brought about heterogeneous social groups and diverse lifestyles. Meeting the social needs of diverse groups has become an important goal of people-oriented urban planning. Therefore more studies are required to investigate differences in individual behavior at the micro level. The concept of lifestyle, which represents both individual's orientation to their lives and behavior choice, has drawn increasing attention from urban geographers, transportation researchers, and urban planners. With the acceleration of modernization in urban areas and increased significance of individual choice, the interactions among lifestyle, urban space, and individual behavior are even more enhanced. Lifestyle has an essential influence on individual's behavior in daily life, leading to increased intergroup differences in individual behavior and coping strategy to space policy. Thus, scholars have argued that more behavioral studies from the perspective of lifestyle are needed. Even though the lifestyle concept has been used in behavioral studies in Western countries since the 1970s, empirical studies investigating the interactions among lifestyle, urban space, and individual behavior only boomed in the last 10 years and there exist very few behavioral studies from the perspective of lifestyle in China. Based on time geography and activity-based approach, this article reviews the progress of behavioral studies from the perspective of lifestyle in China and abroad. First, we summarize the two key theoretical foundations of this field. We point out that the life path-daily path dialectic in time geography and hierarchical decision model in activity-based approach are essential theory about the relationship among lifestyle, urban space, and individual behavior. Then, we further review the two trends in behavioral studies based on lifestyle. One is the quantitative measurements of lifestyle group clusters based on different indices. There are complex factors of lifestyle, including socio-demographics, urban form, attitude and value, and space-time behavior. Space-time behavior has become a key factor to measure lifestyle. Another is to understand behavioral patterns among lifestyle groups using complicate models. Existing studies have examined the impact of lifestyle on space-time behavior in daily life, and found that there are great behavior differences between lifestyle groups. By reviewing the state-of-the-art research of this field, we indicate that lifestyle perspective can provide a new method for Chinese behavioral studies to understand the complex socio-spatial transition in urban China.
Metropolitan tourism is a vital force in the development of regional economy and has become an important part of the research of tourism geography. But the formation mechanism and characteristics of change of metropolitan tourism system has yet to be well studied, which limits the depth of study on metropolitan tourism. Based on a literature review, this article examines the definition, organization, and drivers, mechanism, and processes of change of these systems. The conclusions are as follows: (1) Metropolitan tourism system is an open, dynamic, and holistic tourism region complex consists of attractions, destinations, facilities, media, transportation, as well as one or several agglomeration center cities within a particular geographic unit based on the material basis of regional urban system and ecological space. Such system has the characteristics of homogenous cultural origin, clear scale hierarchy, strong industrial connection, and zonal spatial differentiation.(2) Many external factors such as economic globalization, information technology, and traffic development have promoted the formation and development of metropolitan tourism. Meanwhile, tourism demand, tourism industry agglomeration, major events, regional tourism brand marketing, and government tourism cooperation have together promoted the formation and optimization of metropolitan tourism systems. Geographical proximity and attraction, impact of industrial production chain, administrative coordination, and cultural structure jointly promoted the spatial evolution of metropolitan tourism system , formed the polarization attract, convection, and balanced optimization development stages, and presented space development models of single center expansion, spatial linkage, and multistage network accordingly. The conclusion is of great significance for the understanding of metropolitan tourism system and subsequent research.
