Landscape pattern changes in urbanization of Pudong New District, Shanghai

Urbanization is one of the most important anthropogenic impacts on natural landscape, while urban landscape pattern can reflect the urbanization process and its ecological consequences. In this paper, landscape metrics combined with gradient analysis was employed to analyze the landscape pattern changes of Pudong New District in Shanghai, based on the land use datasets derived from 1:50 000 aerial photos of 1994 and 2000, respectively. The results demonstrated that the landscape pattern of Pudong changed dramatically in its ever-increasing urbanization. The land cover, which was dominated by agriculture in 1994, gradually transformed to urban land use, such as residential area, public facilities, and industry. The percentage of agriculture land use decreased from 71.45% to 41.32%, while the urban land use hold 18.2% in 1994 but rose to 41.9% in 2000. Synoptic landscape characteristics showed the increased patch numbers (from 4.08 to 28.65 ind. · km^-2), diminished area-weighted mean (from 24.43 to 1.75 km²), decreased aggregation index (from 98.31 to 95.09), and augmented landscape diversity and evenness, all of which demonstrated the higher landscape fragmentation and landscape heterogeneity induced by urbanization. The landscape pattern along the urban-rural gradient reflected the different urbanization stages, and the expanding urban frontier in different years in Pudong New District could be identified precisely with class-level landscape indices. The changes in landscape pattern along the transect suggested that the quantitative analysis of landscape dynamics, especially the landscape metrics combined with gradient analysis, could be a robust tool to study urban morphology, urban structure, and ecological consequences during urbanization.