Dynamic monitoring of land-use/land-cover change and urban expansion in Shenzhen using Landsat imagery from 1988 to 2015

To analyse changes in human settlement in Shenzhen City during the past three decades, changes in land use/land cover (LULC) and urban expansion were investigated based on multi-temporal Landsat Thematic Mapper/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus/Operational Land Imager (TM/ETM+/OLI) images. Using C4.5-based AdaBoost, a hierarchical classification method was developed to extract specific classes with high accuracy by combining a specific number of base-classifier decisions. Along with a classification post-processing approach, the classification accuracy was greatly improved. The statistical analysis of LULC changes from 1988 to 2015 shows that built-up areas have increased 6.4-fold, whereas cultivated land and forest continually decreased because of rapid urbanization. Urban expansion driven by human activities has considerably affected the landscape change of Shenzhen. The urban-expansion pattern of Shenzhen is a mixture of three urban-expansion patterns. Among these patterns, traffic-driven urban expansion has been the main form of urban expansion for some time, especially in the Non-Special Economic Zone. In addition, by taking 8 to 10 year periods as time intervals, urban expansion in Shenzhen was divided into three stages: the early-age urbanization stage (1988–1996), the rapid urbanization stage (1996–2005), and the intensive urbanization stage (2005–2015). For different stages, the state of urban expansion is different. In long-term LULC dynamic monitoring and urban-expansion detection, it was possible to obtain 11 LULC maps, which took 2 to 4 years as a research interval. With regard to the short research periods, LULC changes and urban expansion were investigated in detail.