“…In recent years, a number of scholars have given a more neutral definition of urban expansion, arguing that urban construction land [8], changes in urban land and population size [9], built-up areas [10], impervious surfaces [11,12], etc., are the main contents of urban expansion. Thus, scholars mostly use remote sensing monitoring [1,6], GIS spatial analysis [13,14], fractal theory [15,16], landscape index measurement [17,18], cellular automata model [19,20], and other methods to study the phenomenon of urban expansion. From a macro perspective, they extract impervious surface area, monitor the change of urban construction land area, analyze urban land use efficiency, study the scale, space, and morphological characteristics of expansion, and predict the urban development pattern; from a micro perspective, they analyze the landscape pattern characteristics of urban expansion, and judge the mode of urban spatial expansion [21,22] (infill, expansion, enclave, and linear [23]), and thus provide a scientific basis for promoting green urbanization and sustainable development [24,25].…”