Impact of land transformation processes in Eastern China on the long-term development of land surface temperatures

Abstract

The purpose of the presented study is to evaluate the comprehensive impact of different land cover types on the temperature development in the entire Shandong Province by a 20-year-long (MODIS) LST time series from 2003 to 2022. To find out the primary influencing factors, methods such as the Pearson correlation, stepwise analysis, and best-subset selection were applied. The results revealed that the average temperatures had been rising in summer during day- and night-time by 2.32 °C and 1.22 °C, respectively and in winter during day- and night-time by 3.25 °C and 1.33 °C, whereby a significant contribution can be attributed to the period 2014-2022. Substantial variations in LSTs emerge between built-up and vegetated areas and landlocked and coastal regions. Moreover, we could identify a contribution of 0.089 °C, caused merely by the extension of built-up areas of 1.65% in the entire Shandong Province. Modeling the combined effects of further relevant variables/factors, the percentage of cropland area (crop-per) and the number of landscape patches (NP_l) indicate considerable influence on the daytime temperature in the temporal domain.

Keywords:

• Land cover
• urban sprawl
• landscape metrics
• MODIS land surface temperature (LST)
• 20 years’ time series

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation and original draft preparation were completed by Tingting Chen, Methodology and data collection were performed by Shanyu Zhou and Yu Wang. Review and editing were written by Ran Kang and Hang Chen. Supervised by Hermann Kaufmann. All authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their time and efforts to review this paper and improve our work. This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Data availability statement

The data will be available upon reasonable request through corresponding authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Shandong [grant number 2021ZDSYS01]; the Humanities and Social Sciences Youth team project of Shandong university (Weihai); the New Humanities and Social Sciences of China [grant number 2021140084]. It did not receive further specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.