Land Use/Cover Change from 2001 to 2010 and its Socioeconomic Determinants in Guangdong Province, A Rapid Urbanization Area of China

Abstract

Rapid economic and population growth exert profound effects on land use/cover change, especially in rapid economically developing areas, such as Guangdong Province-a pioneer of economic growth and urbanization in China. To elucidate the changes and mutual conversions of land-use types and their determinants in Guangdong Province, land-use maps of Guangdong Province from 2001 to 2010 were obtained from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) L1B images with 500 m resolution by using the supervised classification combined support vector machine (SVM) algorithm with a decision tree. The results indicate that during the studied time period, the area of urban land and orchards increased by 4186 km2 and 3615.5 km2, respectively, while the percentage of cropland decreased from 11.46% to 10.14%. Massive urbanization and cropland loss have occurred in the region. The conversion from wasteland to urban land, and the mutual transformation between wasteland and cropland were the most prevalent in Guangdong Province. This was especially obvious from 2007 to 2010, with an annual changing rate of 5.13% and -19.33%, respectively. Several socio-economic factors were also obtained to investigate their impacts on land-use changes in Guangdong Province. It is shown that marked increases in gross domestic product (GDP), total investment in fixed assets, total retail sales of consumer goods, and the increasing development of modern service industries have led to large-scale migration, and industrial structure adjustment and improvement; consequently dramatically rapid expansion of cities and cropland loss have occurred.