Evaluation model of urban land intensive use based on nighttime light remote sensing data

Abstract: With the acceleration of the urbanization, urban land intensive use becomes necessary for the development of city. In the traditional study of urban land intensive use, all kinds of socio-economic statistical data are used and evaluation indicators based on analytic hierarchy process are built for the analysis of the land intensive use. However, there are many difficulties, such as data collection, data "monopoly" and data distortion. Under the background of new urbanization, it is important to optimize the structure of land resource utilization, improve the utilization efficiency of land resources and rationally control the scale of urban construction land. Jiangsu Province is taken as an example for the urban land intensive use in this research. Nighttime light data are considered as a good data source in the many studies of society and economy, because they can objectively reflect the social and economic activities. Before using nighttime data, a series of pre-processing work is needed to ensure the accuracy of the experimental result. Nighttime light data and built-up area data from 1996 to 2012 in Jiangsu Province are used to construct the allometric growth model of city light intensity - urbanization of land based on order space at the scale of prefecture-level city. And then the nighttime light data and built-up area data in 2015 are used to construct the model based on phase space at county scale. The allometric growth index is used to analyze the growth relation between city light intensity and urbanization of land based on the city scale of Jiangsu Province. At the same time, the effect of time lag of urban light on urban land is considered, and the allometric growth model is improved by adding lag term. A new allometric growth model is constructed. By selecting typical cities with different development levels, restrictive relations between urban light and the stock urban land and the new urban land are assessed separately based on the lag term coefficient. The result shows that the land intensive use level is significantly different from north to south. The new model considering the lag effect is better in analysis of relationship between city light and urban land growth. There is exactly a lagging phenomenon of urban light relative to the urbanization of land. The light of most cities mainly concentrates on the stock land, and the light of the new urban land has lag phenomenon to a certain extent. The new functional area pattern of "1+3" in Jiangsu Province also has obvious regional characteristics of allometric growth. The intensive use level in Yangtze River urban agglomeration is higher than other zones obviously. This study validates the rationality of the strategy of "1+3" functional areas and has a certain reference value to the change of Jiangsu's economic pattern. This study takes advantage of the urban nighttime light remote sensing data in long time series and large scale, which avoids the cumbersome and time-consuming data collection process in traditional land intensive use evaluation system. It can effectively evaluate the land intensive use level of cities with different development degrees. Therefore, this method can provide a reliable reference guide for the utilization of land resources in China.