Overview

Urban land use in today's cities is more fragmented than ever. Urbanisation creates overbuilding, lack of greenery and grim facades. It is also associated with a decline in species and trophic diversity. Recent concerns about global warming have led to a more holistic view of planning for the environment. As a result, public open spaces have been created with the purpose of improving people's health and quality of life, as well as providing habitat for different species within urban areas. Variation of green areas and habitat has been poorly documented. This motivates an investigation on how the mean and variance of the percentage of green areas varies with distance and area type. This is done by designing a method using satellite imagery in three cities: Beijing, Lima and London. It was found that the mean of green percentage and distance varied with city and with area type. In Beijing, green spaces decline to a similar plateau. In Lima, green space decreases very slightly in residential areas but rises slightly in commercial centres. In London, there is a rise to asymptote in residential areas while in the commercial ones, there is an apparent rise. The relationship between the variance of green space and distance varied with city as well. In Beijing, the variance declines exponentially with distance and decreases slightly in Lima and London. This means that the different proportion of green areas will have different effects on the biodiversity in each city. This is based on the connectivity represented by the variance and mean percentage while following principles of island biogeography. Keywords: connectivity, dispersal, habitat areas, island biogeography, urbanisation

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