Spatiotemporal Evolution Characteristics of Urbanization in the Xiamen Special Economic Zone Based on Nighttime-Light Data from 1992 to 2020

Abstract

In China and elsewhere, urban expansion is directly related to the important issues of social development, economic development, and the sustainable development of the ecological environment. Traditional statistical methods based on administrative regions lack geospatial information, which makes it difficult to analyze and explore in detail the development status and spatial differences of cities. In real time, nighttime light (NTL) remote sensing can reveal the spatial expansion change information of urban built-up areas (UB) on different scales, thus allowing for the analysis of urban spatial patterns and variations in urban development. Based on the long-time sequence NTL data from 1992 to 2020, this work studies the Xiamen Special Economic Zone by using the vegetation-water-adjusted NTL urban index (VWANUI) to extract the urban built-up areas and study the UB expansion patterns, the migration of the urban center of gravity, and intra-city differences. The result is a qualitative and quantitative temporal and spatial evaluation of Xiamen’s economic development characteristics. The results show that the UB of Xiamen expanded 349.219 km2 from 1995 to 2020, mainly concentrated in the period 2005–2020, during which time 79.44% of the expansion of the whole study period occurred. Throughout the study period, the urban center of gravity of Xiamen city shifts 8757.15 m to the northeast at the rate of 350.29 m/year in the direction of 74.88° (the urban center of gravity shifted from the inner island to the outer island). The total brightness of nighttime lights in Xiamen is gradually increasing, indicating that the level of urban economic development continuously improved over the measurement period, that human social activities have strengthened, and that the cross-island development strategy has produced certain results. These results provide data that describe urban development and policy formulation in Xiamen.