Assessing Land Cover and Ecological Quality Changes under the New-Type Urbanization from Multi-Source Remote Sensing

The traditional rapid urbanization process is the result of a strong focus on economic development, while its ecological and environmental aspects are less focused upon. The “new-type urbanization” (NTU) concept considers ecological conservation during the urbanization process. The different impacts of the two processes on regional ecological environment evolutions remain insufficiently investigated and still draw significant attention from urban planners and land managers when formulating proper land use policies. Thus, this study was designed to fill the gap by evaluating and comparing different effects of the traditional urbanization and NTU on urban land cover (LC) and ecological quality changes in the Jiangbei New Area, Nanjing, China. We first established a LC database using an object-oriented classification of multi-source high-resolution satellite images. Next, we quantified changes in ecological quality using the remote sensing ecological index (RSEI) model. Subsequently, spatial auto-correlation analysis was conducted to detect the clustering trend of the changing ecological quality in the study area over time. The results showed that the overall accuracy of the LC maps was 90.75% in 2009, 91.75% in 2015, and 92.04% in 2019. The average RSEI values of the study area were 0.583, 0.559, and 0.579, respectively. The spatial auto-correlation analysis indicated a strong positive correlation between the ecological qualities. However, the spatial distribution changed slightly from a clustered trend to a more random and dispersed trend as the Moran’s I decreased. The observed changes are attributed to the strict implementation of ecological conservation and restoration policies by the local government in the NTU process, as well as an increased residents’ awareness of protecting natural resources, indicating that the traditional urbanization has a stronger negative disturbance on regional ecological conditions than NTU. The proposed evaluation method can be applied to other similar regions for sustainable urban management.