Analyzing urban green space pattern and eco-network in Hanoi, Vietnam

In Hanoi, the capital city of Vietnam, there has recently been a growing awareness about the roles and benefits of greening in urbanized areas. As a result, planners and decision-makers propose a combination of water bodies and green areas, using cultural as well as historic values, in a strategic concept for city planning in Hanoi. This study aims at quantifying the landscape patterns and ecological processes or clearly linking pattern to process to identify green space changes and their driving forces, based on gradient analysis combined with landscape metrics, GIS support, and FRAGSTATS 3.3, from 1996 to 2003. The results of gradient analysis taken four directions show that green spaces have been become more fragmented in this period, especially in the south and west directions. These changes could be caused by land use change, economic growth, population increase, urbanization, and weakness in planning and managing the urban development. From this context, graph theory was also applied to find any eco-networking, by mitigating the fragmentation and enhancing the green space connectivity, as a biodiversity conservation strategy for the city. Analyzing the green network based on graph theory indicates that among six different network scenarios which were produced from several models (Traveling Salesman, Paul Revere, Least Cost to User), network F with 37 links, and gamma (0.07), beta (0.62), cost ratio (0.606), circuitry (0.098) and connectivity (0.398) is the best option for ecological restoration in the Hanoi city. This will be a basis for the 2020 Green Space Planning in Hanoi. © 2007 International Consortium of Landscape and Ecological Engineering and Springer.