Analysis of land use/land cover changes and driving forces during the period 1992–2022: a case study of Jinan City, China

This research aims to quantify the spatial pattern of urban land use/land cover (LULC) change while considering environmental effects. This paper integrates historical Landsat imagery, a remote sensing image processing platform (ENVI), geographical information system (GIS), and socioeconomic data to determine the spatial–temporal urban LULC dynamics and the conversion of LULC in response to the rapid urbanization from 1992 to 2022. Principle component analysis and multiple linear regression are used to determine and model the relationship between the socioeconomic factors and the changes for identifying the driving forces. The results indicate that impervious surfaces have exponentially increased, expanding more than two times from 2,348 to 4,795 km2, in contrast to bare lands, which drastically declined by 95%, from 1,888 to 87 km2. Water bodies have always been relatively fewer, at approximately 100 km2. In addition, the majority of farmland in Jinan City is concentrated in the northern region with a steady area in the range of 2,100–2,900 km2, while the majority of woodland located in the southern region declined from 3,774.52 km2 (37%) to 3,088.28 km2 (30%). Economic development, population growth, and climate change are the primary factors that have an obvious impact on LULC changes.