Research
| Title： | Linking greenhouse gas emissions to urban landscape structure: the relevance of spatial and thematic resolutions of land use/cover data |
|---|---|
| First author： | Luan, Xia-li; Buyantuev, Alexander; Baur, Albert Hans; Kleinschmit, Birgit; Wang, Haijun; Wei, Sheng; Liu, Maosong; Xu, Chi |
| Journal： | LANDSCAPE ECOLOGY |
| Years： | 2018 |
| DOI： | 10.1007/s10980-018-0661-9 |
| Abstract： | Emissions of greenhouse gases in urban areas play an important role in climate change. Increasing attention has been given to urban landscape structure-emission relationships (SERs). However, it remains unknown if and to what extent SERs are dependent on observational scale. To assess how changing observational scales (in terms of spatial and thematic resolutions) of urban landscape structure affect SERs. We examined correlations between 16 landscape metrics and greenhouse gas emissions across 52 European cities, through (1) systematic manipulation of spatial and thematic resolutions of the urban land use/cover (ULUC) dataset, and (2) comparison between available standard ULUC datasets with different spatial resolutions. Our analyses showed that the observed SERs significantly depend on both thematic and spatial resolutions of the ULUC data. For the 16 landscape metrics, we found diverse spatial/thematic scaling relations exhibiting monotonic, hump-shaped or scale-invariant trends. For different landscape metrics, the SERs were strongest at different spatial scales, suggesting that there is no consistent scaling relation over those observational scales. SERs are highly sensitive to spatial and thematic resolutions of landscape data. To avoid the problem of 'ecological fallacy,' important caveats should be taken for interpretations based on single landscape metrics. Particular consideration should be paid to metrics that are easily interpretable, predictable in scaling behaviors, and important for shaping SERs, such as PLAND, ED, and LPI. Systematic investigations on scaling behaviors of SERs over well-defined scale domains are encouraged in future studies linking greenhouse gas emissions and urban landscape structure. |
