Abstract
Vegetation in urban areas has several functions such as the conservation of ecosystem, the reduction of urban heat island phenomenon, etc. The spatial continuity of vegetation distributions is required for the effective performance of the functions. In order to make locational planning of greenery areas, it is necessary to grasp the long-term change of the greenery areas. We have developed a spatial analysis method for detecting the continuity of vegetation distributions on a regional scale using remotely sensed data. The method consists of local spatial autocorrelation analysis, an overlay analysis, and a hydrological analysis with the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) adopted as the proxy of vegetation abundance. In this study, we apply the spatial analysis to two types of remotely sensed data acquired in 2000 and 2013, respectively. We discuss the long-term change of the spatial continuity of vegetation distributions through comparing between the results of the analysis. As a result, a change of the continuity of vegetation distributions were found to be involved in areas of large-scale urban development in study area.
