Eco-environmental effects of urban landscape pattern changes: progresses, problems, and perspectives
城市景观格局演变的生态环境效应研究进展

Urbanization refers to a process in which an increasing proportion of an entire population lives in cities and the suburbs of cities. A primary goal of urbanization is to develop a harmonious region between natural landscapes and human habitation. However, urbanized ecosystems and urban human populations are expanding around the world, causing many negative environmental effects, such as traffic jams, resource shortage, environmental pollution, and ecological degradation. Therefore, urban landscape changes and their eco-environmental effects have been received lots of attentions from researchers, managers, and the public. This paper presents a comprehensive review of researches on urban landscape changes and their eco-environmental effects. These eco-environmental effects identified in this study include urban heat island effect, air pollution, water issues, destruction of habitats, ecosystem service changes, and so on. The paper points out problems in current studies of urban landscape patterns: (1) Current studies are mainly implemented on the development and application of quantitative indices to quantify landscape pattern changes, whereas few has focused on the impacts of landscape pattern changes on the regional ecological security; (2) Although more recent efforts have been attempted to study the relationship between urban heat island effect and landscape pattern changes, relatively less results is available to explain the thermal mechanism of urban heat island effects; (3) Most studies focus on the effect of urban green landscape on air pollutant absorption, air particle retard,the comprehensive effects of urban landscape change on atmospheric quality and dust haze effect, are however less studied;(4) Attempts have been made to study urban ecological land uses to improve regional ecological security, but quantitative guidelines in relation to the landscape planning is also needed more integrated efforts among different disciplines. We suggest that more efforts should be implemented on integrating spatial data in multiple scales to reveal the environmental effects of landscape changes and their physical mechanisms. Moreover, multi-objective spatial optimization model for ecological land-use allocation should be developed by integrating the models of urban sprawl and ecosystem service evaluation.