Title：
Spatiotemporal dynamics and driving factors of vegetation coverage around linear cultural heritage: A case study of the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal
Title of
Journal：
Journal of Environmental Management
Paper
Code：
Volume：
349
Number：
Page：
119431
Others：
Classification：
Source：
Abstract：
Linear cultural heritage, which plays significant roles in safeguarding the world’s cultural and maintaining global
civilization, has obtained rising concerns in purpose of sustainability. However, in view of existing publications,
most attention has been paid on its values of recreation, history and culture. Its ecological environment is still
poorly understood. As the longest linear cultural heritage in the world and spiritual symbol of China, the Beijing_x0002_Hangzhou Grand Canal (BHGC) was selected as the study area in this study. We focused on the vegetation
coverage around the BHGC from 2000 to 2020 and aimed to practically investigate whether and why vegetation
distributes imbalanced along the entire BHGC. The annual Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI),
derived from Landsat images, was used to indicate the spatiotemporal dynamics of vegetation coverage. Based on
ten natural and human interference factors, the geographic detector model was applied to analyze its driving
mechanism. Results show that (1) vegetation coverage around the BHGC presented apparently spatial heterogeneity. Cities located at both ends of the BHGC showed lower vegetation coverage, whereas those in the middle
were relatively higher. (2) Vegetation coverage in 23 cities around the BHGC was relatively stable over time, i.e.,
nearly 76.39% of the study area was measured unchanged trend. The slight degradation mainly occurred to the
sub-urban and extra-urban areas. (3) The driving forces of human interferences on vegetation coverage dynamics
around the BHGC surpassed natural factors from 2000 to 2020. Population density, GDP and cultural heritage
density presented higher explanatory powers of vegetation growth compared to other seven factors. These
findings provide a scientific basis for local governments to intervene in vegetation changes and ecological
restoration through natural and human factors within the favorable scope.
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