Landscape Pattern Dynamics and Landscape Sustainability in Shenzhen City

urbanization, land use, landscape pattern, landscape sustainability, Shenzhen Abstract. Urbanization has been a universal and irresistible trend across the world. Quantifying urban landscape pattern changes can provide detailed information to understand the urbanization process and to operationalize landscape sustainability. Combining the remotely sensed images and landscape metrics, we analyze the land use structure and landscape dynamics in a typical region of rapid urbanization in China—Shenzhen during the period of 1980-2010. The results showed that the dominant semi-natural and agricultural landscape has been fundamentally converted into the human-induced landscape. At the landscape level, the signatures of landscape dynamics exhibited a coalescence-diffusion-coalescence pattern. At the class level, the degree of fragmentation and shape complexity of four main land use types substantially increased.