Assessment of urban heat islands for land use based on urban planning: a case study in the main urban area of Xuzhou City, China

The urban heat island (UHI) effect is an important issue in urban planning. In this study, the framework of the land surface temperature (LST) and UHIindex for urban development land (UDL) based on urban planning in China was proposed to examine the spatiotemporal evolution of the LST and the UHIindex for the whole city as well as the LST and the UHIindex of UDL at four node stages (1995, 2003, 2014 and 2019), reflecting the process of urbanization. The results demonstrate that the UHIindex showed an overall trend of first decreasing and then increasing in the process of urbanization over 2 decades. The UHI is characterized by the evolution of spatial distribution from a local point-like aggregation (1995) to a linear expansion along the urban construction land (2003), then to patchy areas tending towards overall homogeneous coverage gradually expanding (2019). The LST increased yearly, but the UHIindex first decreased and then increased, while the average UHIindex and the LST of UDL in the overall relationship maintained good consistency each year. The industrial and logistics concentration area with railway marshalling yard as the core area is the most important patch to maintain the urban thermal pattern. The results provide a quantitative basis for the thermal environmental planning of UDL and a reference for research on UHI under different land planning and management systems in other countries and regions of the world.