Fractal Characteristic Analysis of Urban Land use Evolution with Remote Sensing Images in Shenzhen City

Abstract Changes in urban land use/land cover (LULC) are the result of national policy and the economic activities of the urban population.Determining the spatial pattern of land cover types in cities is of particular significance for sustainable regional development.To achieve a better understand the spatiotemporal patterns of land cover types, this study uses the fractal dimension of spatial distributions as an index of the complex evolution of urban land-use.A long-term sequences LULC datasets are collected to do analysis, which covers the period 1988-2015 by employing Landsat TM/ETM+/OLI.Last but not least, a granularity analysis is adopted to study the structural changes of each land cover.Over this period, the fractal dimension of grassland, waterbody, and bare land exhibited bi-fractal dimensionality, but grassland, and bare land showed a consistently increasing bi-fractal trend, while the waterbody bi-fractals trend is weakened. The development of urban land saw a process of a multi-scale differential development with a hierarchical spatial system, and information entropy indicates that the urban land-use structure was unevenly distributed. These findings offer a scientific references for regional planning decisions on the evolution of urban land use in Shenzhen.