Reconstructing the historical spatial land use pattern for Jiangsu Province in mid-Qing Dynasty

Abstract

This study is proposed to reconstruct a high-resolution spatial distribution of historical land use pattern with all land use types to overcome low-accuracy and/or the monotonic land use type in current historical land use reconstruction studies. The year of 1820 is set as the temporal section and the administrative area of Jiangsu Province is the study area. Land use types being reconstructed include farmland, residential land (including both urban land and rural residential land), water body, and other land (including forest land, grassland, and unused land). Data sources mainly refer to historical documents, historical geographic research outcomes, contemporary statistics, and natural environmental data. With great considerations over regional natural resources and social and economic conditions, a few theoretical assumptions have been proposed to facilitate the adjustment on prefecture farmland, urban land, and rural residential land. Upholding the idea that the contemporary land use pattern has been inherently in sequence with the historical land use pattern as well as the land use pattern shall be consistent to its accessibility, this study reconstructs the land use pattern in Jiangsu Province in 1820 with 100 m*100 m grids based on accessibility analysis and comprehensive evaluation. The outcome has been tested as valid by regionalization and correlation analysis. The resulted spatial distribution shows that back in 1820 in Jiangsu Province: (1) farmland, urban land, rural residential land, water body, and other land take about 48.49%, 4.46%, 0.16%, 15.03%, and 31.86% of the total land area respectively; (2) the land use pattern features high proportion of land in farming while low-proportion land in non-farming uses while population, topography, and the density of water body lead to great spatial variations; and (3) the reconstruction methodology has been tested as reasonable based on significant positive correlations between 1820 data and 1985 for both farmland and rural residential land at the prefecture level.

Understanding Urban Growth in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region over the Past 100 Years Using Old Maps and Landsat Data

“…Rate of urban expansion: The rate of urban expansion is the change in urban land area per unit time [27], which is expressed as:…”

“…The fractal dimension is 1 for straight lines and 2 for rectangles, and the calculated value should be in the theoretical range between 1 and 2. Accordingly, the larger the value, the more complex the shape of the city [27].…”

“…Zohar integrated multi-source data to evaluate the development of routes in the Negev region during the twentieth century [26]. Jin and his team combined historical documents, old maps, and remote sensing, especially using the large-scale topographic maps of the Republic of China, to carry out urban recovery in the Jiangsu or Yangtze River Delta for 200 and 600 years [27][28][29]. Yu et al reconstructed a continuously covered cropland distribution dataset in China spanning from 1900 to 2016 by assimilating multiple data sources [30].…”

Quantitative estimation and spatial reconstruction of urban and rural construction land in Jiangsu Province, 1820–1985

“…Rural settlement land refers to the land outside the urban area but not used for agricultural production. It includes farmers' residential areas, courtyards, and drying areas as well as land for village infrastructure and public facilities (Hu et al, 2007;Jin et al, 2016).…”

“…Data of four gates along the walls and the land vacancy ratio representing arable land and open space that was present within the walls are also used in case for calibration. Moreover, the estimation of the urban construction land at the Fu (city) level also takes the special form of urban administrative divisions (for example, "Fu" and "County" in the same city, or multiple counties within the same city) (Jin et al, 2016) into consideration. Such estimation has been conducted as in Equation 1:…”