Simulation and analysis on eastern coastal urban transitional zone's land use patterns: A case study on Tongzhou in Jiangsu province, China

Urban land-use patterns change has become one of hot topics on land use/ land cover change (LUCC) studies in the worldwide area. As urban land change is influenced by both topography and human behavior driving factors, it is a complex dynamic and spatio-temporal progress. To simulate and analyze urban land use patterns and its driving factors, the logistic regression model is implemented as the statistical tool combined with spatial data by GIS. Because of China coastal development strategy along the Yangtze River, Nantong is one of the most fast-developing cities in the area. Meanwhile, Tongzhou District is the transitional area of Nantong main city, which is the fourth economic city of Jiangsu province located at the eastern coastal area. Based on Tongzhou land-use actual map, DEM from the SRTM and social-economic census data in the 2006 statistical year book, the land use types were mainly re-divided into construction land and cultivated land and all driving factors of topography elements, the distances to the main rivers and roads, and the densities of population and economy were implemented to each own layer with ArcGIS spatial analysis tools. And then each land-use pattern's weight coefficient is calculated by SPSS with the logistic model. Furthermore, those incorporating components of the spatial auto-correlation were also considered. As to the simulation results of Tongzhou, the area under ROC curves of construction land and cultivated land were 0.613 and 0.565 respectively, which was used to compare the land-use probability simulation with the actual map. Due to this study on the plain area, the topography driving factors played a less role than in other related studies and depressed the simulation impression, such as the study on Yongding County, which is one of the typical Karst mountain areas in northwestern Hunan province, were investigated by means of modeling the spatial autocorrelation of land use types with the purpose of deriving better spatial land use patterns on the basis of terrain characteristics and infrastructural conditions. To a certain extent, the social-economic factors mainly determined construction land distribution, and the cultivated land more depended on the surrounding main rivers and roads like Tongzhou, which is located at the eastern coastal plain. From the causes, locations and consequences of urban transitional land-use change, this study could help various local governments with land use planning and policy making.