Spatial Expansion Analysis in Yantai Urban Agglomeration with RS and GIS

Cities and surrounding suburbs are Earth's fastest growing land use.For the purpose of predicting future urban evolution trends and elaborating rational policies for regulation and control, it's significant to distinguish correctly the rules of urban expansion and to analyze the evolution process. Offering a variety of data of urban expansion, the earth observation technology by remote sensing becomes the main approach. Based on the TM image in 1989, ETM+ image in 2000 and TM image in 2009, we use RS and GIS to extract the boundary of urban entity of Yantai urban agglomeration and analyze the area, direction, type and rules of urban expansion from 1989 to 2009. It's indicated that expansion of Yantai urban agglomeration developed rapidly in recent 20 years, and greatly influenced by terrain, port-centered industry, traffic circulation and the government regulation. Index Terms—RS; GIS; Urban agglomeration expansion.