Spatial Analysis Laboratory

An early paper (Jiang and Zhou 2006), funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, examined urban sprawl of Beijing using remote sensing, GIS, and fractal theory. This study finds that Beijing has experienced continuing decentralization, leapfrog development, and segregation of land use.

Later, Jiang received a research grant from Office of International Affairs, Ohio State University, to revisit this question by employing a new method to estimate a compactness index of urban form. The study, reported in Jiang and Liu (2012), shows that the central city of Beijing is highly compact, confirming several findings by others, but also shows that the extent and magnitude of urban sprawl and compactness have significant impact on urban environment including especially urban heat island and local meteorology.

Both studies relate to policy decisions for urban planning and land management.

In joint work with Wainwright, Liu, and Mercer, we conduct a thorough analysis of forest/agriculture use by Mayans in Southern Belize (Wainwright, Jiang and Liu 2013; Wainwright, Jiang, Mercer and Liu 2015; Jiang, Liu, Wainwright, and Mercer, in preparation). This pertains to the long dispute between Maya communities and the Government of Belize as to Maya's indigenous title to forest lands from which they produce a livelihood. A central element in this contention is that Maya communities destroy the forest through "slash and burn" farming.

Encouraged by the Maya Leaders Alliance, we analyze forest change in Southern Belize using remote sensing and GIS. Our work reveals contrasting results:

1. For areas where customary Maya land use and tenure have been consistently practiced since the colonial era, forests are relatively stable.

2. For areas where customary Maya land use practices are no longer the norm, significant deforestation is observed. This work suggests that the popular association of "slash and burn farming" with "deforestation", or the so-called "Maya deforestation", may not be true. A broader implication is that integration of political ecology (PE) and land change science (LCS) can lead to "policy adoptable" results.

An important technical issue in land use/land cover change research is spatial data quality. As land use maps are usually derived from remote sensing image classification, the question turns to the spatial quality of image classification. We develop methods for solving this problem, showing that class membership probabilities can be used to represent spatial data quality.

Methods on spatial classification quality can be grouped into into three types: regression-based, interpolation-based and score-based. Among these, the score-based method is more often used because it has fewer limitations than the others. Under this approach, class membership probabilities (i.e., scores) output from a classification method are used to represent spatial data quality at the pixel level.

Currently, we are working on three projects related to cities and urbanization (stay tuned for detailed results):

• Urban crime

• Housing abandonment

• Urban climate

This is a new project in collaboration with the labs of Drs Lapenas and Buyantuev.

This project is partially funded by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrument (MRI) grant. We obtained an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) through this grant.

Also check out our Phonocam installed at the Huyck Preserve and Biological Research Station.

2017. A newly identified role of the deciduous forest floor in the timing of green-up

2019. Climate change mitigation policy in Ecuador - Effects of land-use competition and transaction costs

2015. Temporal stability of model parameters in crime rate analysis - An empirical examination

2022. Identifying a spatial scale for the analysis of residential burglary - An empirical framework based on point pattern analysis

2013. Deforestation and world as representation - The Maya forest of Southern Belize

2015. The political ecology of a highway through Belizes forested borderlands

2018. Landscape Drivers and Social Dynamics Shaping Microbial Contamination Risk in Three Maya Communities in Southern Belize, Central America

2019. Seasonal Fluxes of Dissolved Nutrients in Streams of Catchments Dominated by Swidden Agriculture in the Maya Forest of Belize, Central America

2019. Dynamics of Change in the Maya Forest

2022. Fusing or filling - Which strategy can better reconstruct high-quality fine-resolution satellite time series

2015. Soil quality index of a crosby silt loam in central Ohio

2016. Tillage effect on partial budget analysis of cropping intensification under dryland farming in Punjab, Pakistan

2011. On chance-adjusted measures for accuracy assessment in remote sensing image classification

2021. A Comparative Spatial and Climate Analysis of Human Granulocytic Anaplasmosis and Human Babesiosis in New York State (2013-2018)

2004. An allometric analysis of the Hohehot urban system using the industrial and agricultural output data

2004. The determination of the regional limits of metropolitan area - a case study of Hangzhou city

2006. The fractal urban form of Beijing and its practical significance

2009. An analytical process of the spatio-temporal evolution of urban systems based on allometric and fractal ideas

2010. Modeling fractal structure of systems of Cities using spatial Correlation function

2012. Box-Counting Dimension of Fractal Urban Form - Stability Issues and Measurement Design

2017. Urban Agglomeration, Urban System and Chengshiqun - Different Concepts