Spatial morphology evolution and formative mechanism of the southern town groups in Huangshan City, China based on remote sensing

In recent years, extensive studies have been done in dynamic monitoring on urban built-up spatial expansion and its dynamic mechanism using the integration technology of remote sensing (RS) and GIS. These previous studies, however, focused on the spatial expansion of a single town without taking into consideration of the spatial morphology evolution of the town groups constituted of several towns. In this paper, we studied the town groups constituted by the Tunxi District, the Huizhou District, the New Town, and the county town of Xiuning, Shexian of Huangshan City in Anhui Province in the southern China. Based on the related RS images (TM and CBERS-1) of these towns and the integration technology of RS and GIS, the information related to urban land use of these southern towns in 1999, 2005 and 2008 were extracted to analyze the towns' urban land expansion. Furthermore, we studied the spatial morphology evolution of the southern town groups and its formative mechanism. Results show that there is a trend of agglomerative development and coalescence in spatial morphology which is becoming increasingly obvious over the years. The spatial morphology evolution of mountainous town groups is mainly attributed to the limited natural environmental resources, the lead of traffic infrastructure constructed and water system, the evolution of city industrial structure, the spatial agglomeration of economic development, as well as the local government's policies and planning.