Urban Expansion and Landscape Diversity Change of Shanghai City, China

Changes in landscape diversity have become a popular for discussion amongst landscape ecologists. Landscape pattern analysis is one of the central problems in landscape ecology. Landscape diversity reflects the proportion of the natural ecosystem in urban areas, which is the key content to urban sustainable development. In this paper, diversity is defined by differences in land use and land cover. This paper presents a combined analysis of the spatiotemporal dynamics expansion and landscape diversity changes in Shanghai, during rapid economic developing period from 2000 to 2006, by using the large scale high spatial-resolution color infrared transparency imagery and Geographic Information System (GIS). In this paper, we carried through this study from two aspects: First, we made a qualitative analysis of three stages of the urban expansion in Shanghai (2000-2003-2006). Second, we selected two diversity indices (Shannon's Diversity Index, SHDI and Shannon's Evenness Index, SHEI) to compute and analyze the landscape diversities and its changes in different spatial scales (in whole Shanghai scale, and district/county scale). These studies are helpful to understand the urbanization process and landscape pattern changes of Shanghai.