A GIS-based urban landscape study of Lanzhou city, China

The study area includes four districts (Chengguan, Qilihe, Anning, and Xigu) of Lanzhou city, whose total area and population is 227.98 km² and 1,800,000 respectively. In this study, we aim to resolve two questions: (1) from the spatial analysis, we want to know what changes have happened on urban landscape characteristics from 1976 to 2004? (2) What is the main driving force behind the changes? This research is based on American quick bird remote sensing image of 2004 and the topographical map of Lanzhou city, the detailed land use data and some cadastral data in 1976 are collected as well as the current land use data. Based on the calculated result, we analyse the change characteristics of the class-level metrics and landscape-level metrics. Our results show that the change trend in landscape can be effectively captured by spatial analysis using the remote sensing image and GIS data processing technique.