Vegetation Baseline and Urbanization Development Level: Key Determinants of Long-Term Vegetation Greening in China’s Rapidly Urbanizing Region

作者：Ke Zeng, Mengyao Ci, Shuyi Zhang, Ziwen Jin, Hanxin Tang, Hongkai Zhu, Ruisheng Zhang, Yue Wang, Yiwen Zhang, Min Liu · 发表于：Remote Sensing · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.3390/rs17142449 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：Land Use and Ecosystem Services、Urban Green Space and Health、Remote Sensing in Agriculture

Urban vegetation shows significant spatial differences due to the combined effects of natural and human factors, yet fine-scale evolutionary patterns and their cross-scale feedback mechanisms remain limited. This study focuses on the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), the top economic area in China. By integrating data from multiple Landsat sensors, we built a high—resolution framework to track vegetation dynamics from 1990 to 2020. It generates annual 30-m Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) data and uses a new Vegetation Green—Brown Balance Index (VBI) to measure changes between greening and browning. We combined Mann-Kendall trend analysis with machine—learning based attribution analysis to look into vegetation changes across different city types and urban—rural gradients. Over 30 years, the YRD’s annual EVI increased by 0.015/10 a, with greening areas 3.07 times larger than browning. Spatially, urban centers show strong greening, while peri—urban areas experience remarkable browning. Vegetation changes showed a city-size effect: larger cities had higher browning proportions but stronger urban cores’ greening trends. Cluster analysis finds four main evolution types, showing imbalances in grey—green infrastructure allocation. Vegetation baseline in 1990 is the main factor driving the long-term trend of vegetation greenness, while socioeconomic and climate drivers have different impacts depending on city size and position on the urban—rural continuum. In areas with low urbanization leve...