Construction of Urban Green Space Network in Kashgar City, China

Abstract

With the new round of western development being pushed forward and territorial spatial planning being put into place, northwest China’s urbanization rate has sped up. Urbanization will inevitably affect the city’s general landscape pattern and features, aggravating the landscape’s fragmentation and destroying the urban ecological environment. That threatens the well-being of the residents and the city’s biodiversity. Urban green space provides a habitat for the creatures in the city, and its connectivity provides corridors. Researchers and planners have developed green space networks to protect urban biodiversity and satisfy urban residents’ needs for recreation and ecologically friendly open space. This study uses RS, GIS, SeNtinel Application Platform (SNAP), and Conefor Sensinode. Applying the landscape connectivity index, least-cost path model, and corridor curvature analysis to identify potential recreation and biodiversity conservation corridors with a reasonable width, identifies good quality green space patches and corridors, or which ones need improvement. The results show that: (1) The patches selected by the possible connectivity index (PC) calculated with a threshold of 100 m in the urban area of Kashgar have higher recreational attributes. (2) There are 24 effective recreational corridors in Kashgar, with a total length of 43.44 km, and 53 effective biodiversity conservation corridors, a total of 78.23 km. Suppose recreational and ecological functions are considered to build a comprehensive green space network. The 50 m recreational corridor is mainly distributed in the center, and the 30 m biodiversity conservation corridor is primarily distributed on edge. (3) We can determine the location of the new green space suitable for protection or development by analyzing the corridor curvature. Through the constructed green space network, we can find that green space planning has severe fragmentation, unfair distribution, and other problems. Based on these issues, optimizing urban green space can promote the connectivity of urban green space. Furthermore, studying the width of corridors suitable for dense urban areas is conducive to protecting urban biodiversity and resident well-being.