Spatial evolution of water transportation industry based on multi-source data: understanding the structural consolidation and integration demand in coastal cities

Abstract

Under the sustainability goals, how to promote the integration of port resources and reduce the ecological risks is important for the water transportation industry. Port cities in Jiangsu Province, a major coastal area in China, face a huge risk of resource waste. This paper aims to take Jiangsu as an example, understand the evolution of the spatial structure and the evolution of the water transportation industry, and explore the factors affecting development from the perspective of low-carbon development. Based on ArcGIS and multi-source data, methods such as Standard Deviation Ellipse (SDE) were used to understand the evolution, and the factors influencing the evolution at different stages were explored based on the green total factors such as industrial pollutions. It shows that the scale of the water transportation is expanding, but the industrial upgrading is not realized and has multiple agglomeration cores. The evolution was initially more affected by non-interventional factors such as geographical environment, while later the influence weakened significantly. The disordered development of water transportation industry has been worsening the current inefficient industrial structure and environmental risks. Further integration of industrial structure is needed, and strong administrative means are needed to help tap the unrealized spatial potential of resource integration.

Keywords:

• Water transportation industry
• ArcGIS
• spatial evolution
• SDE
• Jiangsu

Acknowledgments

We thank for the comments provide by the anonymous reviewers. This work acknowledges the support from Fund Project of Jiangsu Higher Vocational Colleges Collaborative Innovation Base for Social Science Application Research (Jiangsu Maritime Intelligent Shipping Research Collaborative Innovation Base), and Zhejiang Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences Circles [Grand No. 2023N116].

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest

Data availability statement

The data in this paper are all from the open access platforms and are explained in the article, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Additional information

Funding

This work acknowledges the support from Fund Project of Jiangsu Higher Vocational Colleges Collaborative Innovation Base for Social Science Application Research (Jiangsu Maritime Intelligent Shipping Research Collaborative Innovation Base), and Zhejiang Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences Circles [Grand No. 2023N116].