Papers by Author: Feng Xia Gu

Abstract: Change detection of landscape patterns has become a fundamental research theme in urban and rural studies due to its scientific importance in understanding the connection of global environment changes to social-economic dynamics. Landscape patterns can be directly represented and visualized by landuse maps, and they can also be further abstracted and mathematically quantified by landscape metrics. This paper examines the changes in coastal landscape patterns of Tianjin Binhai New Area using landuse datasets of 1981, 1990 and 2000. The results show that the coastline played a controlling role in shaping landscape patterns across the study area. As a result, the rate of urban expansion in the north-south direction was much faster than that in the east-west direction. During the period of 1981-2000, most changes occurred on urban land, forestland, wetland and agricultural land, while the change on water bodies remained insignificant.

Abstract: Accurate population prediction has fundamental importance in small town planning. In this paper, two empirical prediction models, integrated growth rate and regression analysis, have been developed with demographic data of 2000-2005 in Gaotang county, Shandong province. The two models were then applied to predict the population in 2008, and their results were compared with the actual population, respectively, to evaluate the modeling accuracy. The results showed that both methods were capable of providing accurate population prediction; however, the accuracy of the integrated growth rate was a little higher than that of regression analysis in terms of their differences from the actual population in 2008.