Remote sensing of impervious surface dynamics of Xiamen City, southeastern China

The worldwide urban sprawl has led to the substitution of natural vegetation- and water-dominated lands by impervious materials such as building roofs and paved roads. This has brought about significant impacts on ecosystems on a local, regional and global scale. Taking Xiamen City of Fujian province, China, as a case, this study investigated the impervious surface dynamics of the city during the last 20 years. The normalized difference impervious surface index (NDISI) was used to extract impervious surfaces of the city from Landsat TM imagery. The results show that the impervious surface area of the city has increased by about eight times at a ~10 % average annual growth rate during the 20 study years. Further investigation of the relationships among impervious surface, land surface temperature (LST), vegetation and water has revealed a strong positive exponential relationship between impervious surface area and LST, while vegetation and water are inversely related to LST.