Abstract

World heritage is a precious treasure left to mankind by history. It is a treasure of all human civilization and has very important historical, artistic and scientific value. Protecting world cultural heritage is a prerequisite for protecting the inheritance of human culture, safeguarding the diversity and creativity of the world’s culture, and promoting the development of mankind. However, the rapid urbanization process globally has changed the land cover/land use, transportation and environmental conditions in cities, and has caused some impacts and damages to the world heritage sites. Based on three global Earth Observation datasets including Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), global population grid products (Worldpop) and the global night-time light images (DMSP/OLS), this paper proposed an urbanization intensity index (UII) to dynamically monitor and quantitatively assess the intensity of urbanization around the world heritage sites. Large UII values represent high urbanization degrees in the study area, and vice versa. The rapid increase of UII indicated that great impacts might be caused by the urban development process on corresponding heritage sites. The assessment results showed that the mean value of UII at 10 world cultural heritage sites in China’s urban areas increased from 0.35 in 2000 to 0.42 in 2015. The urbanization intensity index of the world cultural heritage sites can provide valuable datasets and scientific basis for the protection and development of world cultural heritage sites.

Details

Title
Urbanization monitoring using big Earth Observation data for world heritage sites of China
Author
Qiang-qiang, Li 1 ; Xiang-xin, Li 2 ; Yong-huan, Ma 3 ; Lin-lin, Lu 4 ; Xin-yuan, Wang 4 ; Luo, Lei 4 ; Yu-ting, Cheng 5 ; Rui-chan, Wu 2 

 Faculty of land and Resources Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650032, China; Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China 
 Faculty of land and Resources Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650032, China 
 Information Center, Ministry of Natural Resources, China, Beijing 100812, China 
 Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China 
 Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China; School of Architectural and Surveying & Mapping Engineering, Jiangxi University of Science and Technology, Ganzhou 314000, China 
Publication year
2020
Publication date
May 2020
Publisher
IOP Publishing
ISSN
17551307
e-ISSN
17551315
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2555752626
Copyright
© 2020. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.