Do Urban Functional Zones Affect Land Surface Temperature Differently? A Case Study of Beijing, China

Abstract

The non-uniformity of the relationships between urban temperature and landscape has attracted board attention. The non-uniformity in urban areas is reflected in the spatial landscape’s heterogeneity and the difference of socio-economic functions. The former is shown as the spatial differentiation of land-cover, land-use, landscape composition, and configuration, while the latter leads to the difference of the intensity of human activities and population density, which are closely related with anthropogenic heat emission. Therefore, this study introduces urban functional zones (UFZs) to express urban spatial heterogeneity. This study also attempts to comprehend urban heat island (UHI) effects and discloses the variability of urban surface temperature (LST)–landscape relationships in different kinds of UFZs. There are two main technical difficulties—how to characterize the spatial heterogeneity of UFZs and how to quantify non-uniform LST effects. A three-level variable system is established from their attributes, inner structures, and interrelationships to characterize UFZs and their LST effects hierarchically. Considering the multi-collinearity among high-dimensional variables, the Elastic Net regression method is selected for quantitative analysis. The experimental results reveal the deficiency of uniform LST analysis for heterogeneous urban areas and verify the variable relationships of LST-landscaped with different kinds of UFZs.