Application of LCZ to Land Use and Land Cover Studies

Over the past few decades, rapid urbanisation has occurred globally, especially in developing countries, and this has dramatically changed land use and land cover patterns. Compared to conventional land cover schemes, the LCZ has a rich variety of land types, especially a detailed category of land use and land cover within urban areas, which allows it to provide more information for land use and land cover studies. Therefore, this chapter explores the application of the LCZ to land use and land cover studies in two parts: analysing historical LCZ changes and projecting future LCZ changes. In the first part, we employ LCZ data to analysis historical land use and land cover changes and investigate the transformation pattern between different LCZ types. In the second part, we project changes in the LCZ spatial pattern from 2020 to 2100 at a 100-meter resolution based on the latest Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) using the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as a case study and explore the impact of land management policies on the LCZ spatial pattern. The results show that urbanization in this mega-region during the past decades includes horizontal expansion and vertical densification with high-rise/compact buildings increasing. The existing cellular automata models (e.g. the FLUS model) can be used for the LCZ simulation. Moreover, cities at different development levels show different characteristics of LCZ change. Compact and high-rise types of LCZ tend to grow more in central cities, while fringe cities tend to grow more mid- and low-rise types of LCZ.