Description:
Urban greenspace plays a positive role in improving the urban living environment, and thus extensive studies have paid attention to the mapping of urban greenspace for various applications. Recently, open and high-resolution land-cover (LC) data have been viewed as essential sources for urban greenspace mapping. However, few studies have performed a global-scale analysis; moreover, as there are commonly different LC types in an LC dataset, few studies have investigated how the selection of different LC types as greenspace impacts urban greenspace mapping? Therefore, this study aims to investigate the spatial pattern of urban greenspace at a global scale and the impact on selecting different LC types for urban greenspace mapping. We employed two global open datasets (FROM-GLC10 and GHS-UCDB) and identified 13,079 global urban areas. Various LC types that potentially relate to urban greenspace and three different combinations of LC types were analyzed. Results show that: 1) The spatial pattern of global urban greenspace may vary with the use of different combinations; 2) The impact of whether or not to select each LC type as urban greenspace depends on not only the LC type itself but also the geographic locations. The findings will benefit urban planners and designers to select the proper LC type(s) for urban greenspace studies and serve as practical evidence on proposing strategies to improve the urban living environment