Ecological benefits assessment and spatial modeling of urban ecosystem for controlling urban sprawl in Eastern Beijing, China

Urban expansion as a complex dynamic process of land use change has interested many urban planners and researchers in its relationship to social, economic and ecological factors. How to design an ecological and economic urban form and structure is a problem for urban managers. This study aims to create an urban ecosystem management platform to assist urban managers in better urban development, using the neural-based Cellular Automata (CA) model to simulate urban expansion under three urban expansion scenarios, followed by the evaluation of different urban development scenarios’ complex ecological benefits. In each platform, Eastern Beijing is used as an example, with six sensitive variables in urban expansion chosen to model from 2004 to 2024, based on the data of urban expansion from 1991 to 2004. The complex ecological benefits under different urban land use scenarios were evaluated through analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method. The results show that Eco-service oriented land use Management (EOM) urban expansion scenario is more beneficial, its complex ecological benefits index reaches 0.78, higher than the other expansion scenarios. The findings provide urban developers and managers with a scientific suggestion for development in Eastern Beijing, China.