Monitoring Spatial Patterns and Changes of Ecology, Production, and Living Land in Chinese Urban Agglomerations: 35 Years after Reform and Opening Up, Where, How and Why?

Chinese urban agglomeration (UA) has gradually become a new world economic center and the strategic region of the “The Belt and Road Initiatives”. The spatial patterns and variations of ecology–production–living land (EPL) profoundly affect UA’s development and its ecological environment. Unfortunately, scientific understanding about the trajectories, patterns and drivers of EPL changes in Chinese urban agglomerations (UAs) since reform and opening up is still very limited. The aim of this paper was to monitor those characteristics during the last 35 years. Here, we proposed a new classification system of EPL, including ecology land (EL), industrial production land (IPL), agricultural production land (APL), urban living land (ULL) and rural living land (RLL) due to Chinese urban–rural dual structure. Then, we extracted EPL land from the Chinese LUCC product, which is the recently released remote sensing data product of high resolution spatial land use data in China at national level. Furthermore, we analyzed the spatial-temporal trajectories and driving factors of EPL for Chinese UAs during 1980–2015. The results showed that: (1) ULL and IPL in Chinese UAs were increased rapidly, while EL and APL were seriously decreased. (2) The growth patterns of ULL and IPL had shown a spatial heterogeneity. As to different regional UAs, the expansion rates of ULL and IPL ranked from high to low were as follows: eastern, central, western, and northeastern UAs. (3) National policies, population, and economy dominated the spatial-temporal changes of EPL in Chinese UAs. (4) The multi-planning integration in the structure of land use should be strengthened at UA-scale.