Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011

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Science of the Total Environment

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The relationship between urban form and heat island intensity along the
urban development gradients
Ze Liang, Shuyao Wu, Yueyao Wang, Feili Wei, Jiao Huang, Jiashu Shen, Shuangcheng Li ⇑
College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

h i g h l i g h t s g r a p h i c a l a b s t r a c t

Effects of urban form on UHI changed

significantly along urbanization
gradient.

Urban continuity, complexity,
population density and NDVI become
more influential.

Urban elongation, nighttime light
index and tree cover become less
influential.

Contribution rate of urban size factors
draws a convex curve along
urbanization gradient.

Urban geometry and vegetation
factors become more and less
contributive, respectively.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: There is an increasing demand for urban form optimization to mitigate urban heat island (UHI) effect
Received 19 May 2019 under the background of global climate change and urbanization. However, there is still a lack of under-
Received in revised form 14 October 2019 standing about how the relationship between urban form and UHI intensity changes under diverse
Accepted 15 October 2019
urbanization contexts. This study aims to show the change patterns of the relationship between urban
Available online 4 November 2019
form and UHI intensity along the urban development gradient based upon the investigation of a total
Editor: Ashantha Goonetilleke of 150 urban areas in the Jing-Jin-Ji region in China in 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. We defined a compre-
hensive urban development index taking into account the size of urban area, population density and
Keywords:
night light intensity to classify the different levels of urban development. A multi-model comparison
Urban heat island was carried out to validate the results. We found that the increase in urban continuity, sprawling, scale
Urban form and density all enhanced UHI effect at the regional scale. However, the relationship between urban form
Urban development indicators and UHI intensity demonstrated two opposite patterns along the urban development gradient:
Gradient population density, geometric complexity and continuity, and general vegetation index of a city were
Change pattern found to be increasingly influential, while night light intensity, geometric elongation and forest coverage
Contribution rate curve presented declining influence. Finally, the study obtained an ascending contribution rate curve for urban
geometry indicators, a convex curve for urban size indicators and a declining curve for urban vegetation.
These changes along the urban development gradient may be closely related to the changes of the micro-
climate in cities due to land use, social and economic activities in different urban development stages.
The findings can contribute to more appropriate and effective urban planning in countries and regions
undergoing rapid urbanization as a valuable reference.
Ó 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

⇑ Corresponding author.at: College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
E-mail address: scli@urban.pku.edu.cn (S. Li).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135011
0048-9697/Ó 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
2 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
1. Introduction
Due to global climate change and rapid urbanization, many
cities around the world are experiencing high-intensity urban heat
island (UHI) effects, which exert massive negative impacts on
urban environment, residents0 health and economic development
(Meehl and Tebaldi, 2004; Gabriel and Endlicher, 2011; Dan and
Bou-Zeid, 2013; Heaviside et al., 2016; Campbell et al., 2018).
Many studies have shown that urban form indicators (UFIs) are
among the most important factors influencing the UHI effect
(Bumcrot and Sheingorn, 2004; Stewart, 2011; Ward et al., 2016).
By 2030, urban population in developing countries is expected to
double and urban land cover to triple (UN-Habitat, 2015) while
the proper design of urban form will have profound impacts on
the urban thermal environment and urban sustainability. This
issue has become particularly important because of the strong
‘‘lock-in” effects on the change of urban form: once defined, it is
almost impossible to significantly modify the urban form of a city
because the built environment is largely irreversible and its mod-
ification requires huge costs (Avner et al., 2014). Consequently,
the topic of UFI-UHI relationships has drawn increasing attention
around the world in urban planning, urban ecology and climate
change studies (Pachauri et al., 2014; Balbus et al., 2015; Ürge-
Vorsatz et al., 2018).
As Fig. 1 shows, when considering the scale of a city, the urban
size, geometric form and vegetation coverage level are the basic
dimensions of urban form that have the most fundamental impacts
on the urban thermal environment. Numerous studies have
claimed a positive relationship between the city size and UHI
intensity (Oke, 1973; Estoque et al., 2017; Takebayashi and
Senoo, 2018), as well as strong positive influences of urban density
and socioeconomic activities on UHI intensity (Buyantuyev and
Wu, 2010; Debbage and Shepherd, 2015; Morabito et al. 2016;
Takebayashi and Senoo, 2018; Zullo et al., 2019). The geometric
characteristics of the city as a whole are considered important
influencing factors on the UHI effect for their impacts on the
impervious surface albedo, aerodynamic roughness, heat transfer
and air circulation (Debbage and Shepherd, 2015; Bechtel, 2015;
Sobstyl et al., 2018; Yin et al., 2018). Other studies have confirmed
the cooling effect of urban vegetation due to the changes in the
latent heat flux (Zeng et al., 2010; Monteiro et al., 2016;
Bonafoni et al., 2017; Gunawardena et al., 2017). However, these
UFI-UHI relationships have been recognized as dependent on sea-
Fig. 1. Multidimensional framework and influence pathways of urban form indicators on urban heat island (UHI) effects. Urban size indicators: size of urban area (AREA),
population density (POP), and night light intensity (NLI); Urban geometry indicators: fractal dimension index (FRAC), continuity index (CONTIG) and elongation index
(ELONG); Urban vegetation indicators: the difference between urban and suburban normalized vegetation index (dNDVI) and tree cover ratio (dTREE).
sonal, diurnal, climatic and urbanization factors in particular
(Morabito et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2017; Huang and Wang, 2019).
Urbanization brings profound changes to the physical and
socio-economic characteristics of cities, strengthened by the scale
effects in economy, energy consumption, carbon or air pollutant
emissions and other aspects (Cho and Choi, 2014; Chun and
Guldmann, 2014; Li et al., 2018; Liu et al., 2018; Bai et al., 2019).
It is reasonable to believe that this changing level of urban devel-
opment plays an important role in the relationship between urban
form and the heat island effect because urbanization generally
alters the content of the buildings, the industrial structure, the eco-
nomic activities and the urban microclimate (Czarnecka and
Nidzgorska-Lencewicz, 2014; Jurus et al., 2016; Zhu et al., 2017;
Rafael et al., 2018; Duan et al., 2019). As summarized in Fig. 1,
the increasing complexity of more developed cities will lead to
more traffic flow and building blocks, and this increase may be
non-linear (Bettencourt and West, 2010; Deng and Wu, 2013;
Jurus et al., 2016; Yuan et al., 2018). On the contrary, the upgrading
of the industry may result in fewer heat emissions corresponding
to the same increment of night light intensity. As a result, the
enhancement of the UHI effect by the enlarging urban size may
be weakened by the upgrading of the industry. In addition, studies
show that the microclimate of big cities is different from that of
small cities. Large cities tend to have higher temperatures and
lower air humidity (Khan and Chatterjee, 2016; Takebayashi and
Senoo, 2018), impacting the transpiration of urban vegetation
and thus affecting the cooling efficiency of urban greening along
the urban development gradient (Perini and Magliocco, 2014).
However, there is still a lack of continuous and clear recognition
of the change pattern of the UFI-UHI relationship along the gradi-
ent of the urban development level, preventing us from better
understanding the context-dependent impact of urban form on
UHI and improving the sustainable development of global cities.
First of all, previous studies mainly used a two-category compar-
ison approach between big cities and small cities (Tan and Li,
2015; Ward et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2017; Deilami et al., 2018;
Yin et al., 2018), and the relationship between urban form and
UHI effect was unclear along more detailed urbanization gradient
(Debbage and Shepherd, 2015). Additional problems also led to
conflicts among previous studies in their conclusions for the rela-
tionship between urban form and UHI effect. One problem was
associated with the choice of the research scale (He et al., 2019;
Zhao et al., 2019). For example, urban form factors were claimed
 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
to have little impact on UHI effect in studies at the global or
national scale (Peng et al., 2012; Yang et al., 2017), while to have
a great impact in studies at the regional scale with consistent geo-
graphical background (Tan and Li, 2015) and to have even more
importance in studies at block scale (Huang and Wang, 2019). It
is believed that the study of the effect of urban form on UHI should
be carried out at the appropriate scale that removes the non-urban
climatic effects (Oliveira et al., 2011). Another problem was associ-
ated with the use of different models. Studies showed that the
results of using the time series model and the cross-section model
may be different, which could lead to the finding of a negative or
positive correlation between the urban fractal dimension and the
UHI effect, as an example (Tu et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2017). It is
necessary to use multiple models to verify the results. The existing
models also lacked consideration of the interaction and non-linear
relationship among the urban form indicators (Zhou et al., 2017).
Finally, the relative contribution rates of multiple urban form indi-
cators were not properly considered, limiting urban planners in
better understanding the importance of the different dimensions
of urban form and making trade-offs.
The goal of this paper is to answer the following question
through an empirical study: does the relationship between urban
form and UHI intensity have a clear change pattern along the gra-
dient of urban development? With the hope to contribute to filling
the gaps mentioned above, we constructed a comprehensive
urbanization development index to divide the cities into several
levels. We selected the Jing-Jin-Ji region in China as the research
area and adopted a multi-model approach. The regional scale pro-
vided adequate city samples (600 cities samples from 2000 to
Fig. 2. The study area. The circles represent the 150 urban areas selected for statistical analysis.
3
2015) and a fairly uniform geographic background excluding the
influence of non-urban factors. A variety of models including the
cross-sectional model, panel model and Random Forest model
were compared so as to exclude the impact of model selection
and to take into account the interaction, non-linear relationship
and the relative contribution of different dimensions of urban
form. Finally, we discussed the reasons for the different patterns
in the relationship between urban form and the UHI effect along
the urban development gradient.
2. Materials and methods
2.1. Study area and research framework
2.1.1. Study area
The Jing-Jin-Ji region is located in northern China and covers an
area of 218,000 km2 (Fig. 2). The region mainly has a snow temper-
ate climate with dry winters and hot summers; this corresponds to
the type Dwa in the Köppen-Geiger climate classification (Kottek
et al., 2006). The region includes 2 provincial level municipalities
(i.e. Beijing and Tianjin) and 11 prefecture-level ones and is com-
posed of 202 districts, counties and towns. As one of the most
developed areas in China, the region has experienced rapid urban-
ization in the past several decades. The urban area of the region
increased by 3526 km2 from 2000 to 2015, an increase of 110%,
which is considered remarkable worldwide. Meanwhile, its pro-
portion of urban population increased from 30.3% in 1990 to
62.7% in 2015, and 69.7 million people lived in the urban areas
at the end of 2015, making this region one of the most densely
4 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
populated urban areas in China. The rapid urbanization has
resulted in serious environmental degradation in the region, espe-
cially with the urban heat island problem (Kang and Eltahir, 2018).
The Jing-Jin-Ji Region provides an ideal case for this study.
Firstly, most of the cities in the region are located in the North
China Plain. The abundant densely distributed samples with uni-
form climatic conditions make it easy to control climate factor
variables and provide similar biomes to eliminate the effects of
regional vegetation cover on UHI effect (Tan and Li, 2015). Sec-
ondly, the rapid urbanization in the past decades has resulted in
great changes in the urban form, providing us diverse urban sam-
ples. Finally, the cities in this region are at different levels of urban
development, forming a clear gradient from the impoverished city
Kangbao (Park et al., 2002) to the mega-city Beijing.
We considered the connected urban area across different
administrative units as one single research unit and the uncon-
nected urban areas in the same administrative unit as multiple
research units. We also removed the urban areas affected by the
ocean. The selection resulted in 150 urban areas for statistical anal-
ysis in this study. In general, the Jing-Jin-Ji region has attracted
worldwide attention as one of the largest urban agglomerations
being planned and constructed in China. It provides a typical
example of China’s rapid urbanization. The study not only provides
policy guidance for Jing-Jin-Ji region but also suggestions for envi-
Fig. 3. Framework of the data processing and analysis. (a) Layers used for calculating urban form indicators (UFIs); (b) land surface temperature (LST) layers and urban and
suburban extent used to calculate the UHI intensity. UDI: urban development index.
ronmentally friendly urban planning in other urban agglomera-
tions under rapid urbanization.
2.1.2. Research framework
Fig. 3 shows the general framework for the data processing and
statistical analysis carried out in this study. First of all, the study
was mainly based upon the calculation of urban form indicators
(UFIs), UHI intensity and the urban development index (UDI) in
2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. We also calculated two meteorological
indicators for the four years as control variables in the multivariate
regression between UFIs and UHI intensity and intermediate vari-
ables for the explanation of the impacts of urban form on UHI. The
multi-source data used in the analysis are all interpolated or
resampled to 30 m spatial resolution. Then we analyzed the overall
relationship between UFIs and UHI intensity before stepping fur-
ther to the analysis along the urban development gradient. The
analysis of the overall UFI-UHI relationship also served for select-
ing proper models for the following analysis along the urban devel-
opment gradient. Thus, we used and compared a variety of
methods and models, namely the correlation tests, cross-
sectional regression models and panel models.
After that, we classified the 150 urban areas into different levels
of urban development based upon the widely used natural breaks
(Jenks) method and the urban development index (Jenks, 1967;
 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011 5

Chen et al., 2013). We then analyzed the variation in the UFI-UHI
relationship along the urban development gradient mainly from
three perspectives, namely the correlation degree, the impact
intensity/efficiency and the relative contribution rate of each urban
form indicator to the UHI intensity (Johnson and Lebreton, 2016).
The correlation degree was detected by the correlation tests; the
impact intensity/efficiency was measured by the slope coefficient
of the univariate regression model; the contribution rate reflects
the relative importance of each urban form indicator to the UHI
intensity and was assessed by the Random Forest model. We car-
ried out these analyses for the different groups of urban areas clas-
sified above to investigate the variation along the urban
development gradient. We also created an interaction model to
analyze the interaction effects of urban form indicators and the
urban development index in their impacts on the UHI intensity.
2.2. Data processing and indicators
2.2.1. Urban form indicators
We selected eight commonly used urban form indicators as
shown in Fig. 1, including three scale indicators, namely the size
of urban area (AREA), population density (POP) and night light
intensity (NLI); three geometry indicators, namely the fractal
dimension index (FRAC), continuity index (CONTIG) and elongation
index (ELONG); and two vegetation indicators, namely the differ-
ence between urban and suburban normalized vegetation index
(dNDVI) and tree cover ratio (dTREE). The calculation methods
for all urban form indicators are shown in Table 1. Among them,
the indicator POP was obtained using the average population den-
sity in each urban area based upon the grid-level dataset at a spa-
tial resolution of 1 km from the Center for International Earth
Science Information Network at Columbia University. Log-
transfers were used for AREA and POP to obtain data distributions
closer to a normal distribution to facilitate more effective linear
estimations. Nighttime light intensity (NLI) data at a spatial resolu-
tion of 1 km derived from the Defense Meteorological Satellite
Program-Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) were used as
a proxy for the socioeconomic intensity because the calibrated
NLI data have close positive relationships with the economic devel-
opment level (Kasimu et al., 2009; Gao et al., 2015). We calibrated
the NLI data via the ridgeline sampling regression method to
obtain a consistent NLI time series (Zhang et al., 2016). We used
the NLI data in 2013 for 2015 because the data in 2015 were
unavailable.
Among the geometry indicators, CONTIG, FRAC and ELONG
were used to assess the spatial connectedness (LaGro, 1991), the
complexity (Mandelbrot, 1982; Schwarz, 2010; Zhou et al., 2017)
and the elongation (Baker and Cai, 1992) of the urban area, respec-
tively. We obtained the geometry indicators for each urban area
using the area-weighted method and land use data at a spatial res-
olution of 30 m acquired from the Resource and Environment Data
Cloud Platform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. NDVI and TREE
were derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiome-
ter (MODIS) datasets, namely the MOD13A3 at a spatial resolution
of 500 m and MOD44B at a spatial resolution of 250 m, respec-
tively. We used the average NDVI during the whole growing season
from May to September and the annual average of tree cover ratio
and calculated their differences between urban and suburban
areas. The extent of the urban areas was identified for the years
2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015, based upon the land use data. The
extents of the suburban areas were the same as those determined
for the calculation of the UHI intensity (Section 2.2.3).

Table 1
Calculation methods and descriptions of the urban form indicators used in this study.

UFI Equation Parameter Description

Urban area size AREA ¼ logðai Þ ai = area (km2) of urban grid i AREA indicates the area of urban expansion
(AREA)


Urban population POP ¼ log ps i psi = population size of urban POP represents the degree of population density
ai
density path i, ai = area size of urban
(POP) patch i
Nighttime light NLIref ¼ aNLItar þ bNLItar þ c
2 NLIreference = the reference NLI shows the lights generated from electricity. Areas of high economic
intensity (NLI) image NLItarget = the target prosperity and population are generally the areas that are well illuminated
image
a,b,c = the coefficients
estimated using the
ordinary least squares
regression technique
Fractal dimension 2lnð:25pij Þ pij = perimeter (m) of patch ij FRAC helps to quantify the degree of complexity of the planar shapes
FRAC ¼ lnaij
index aij = area (m2) of patch ij
(FRAC)
Contiguity index P
n
cijr = contiguity value of pixel p CONTIG assesses the spatial connectedness or contiguity of cells within a grid-
cijp

(CONTIG) p¼1
½ a -1 in zone ij cell patch. It equals 0 for a one-pixel patch and increases to a limit of 1 as patch
CONTIG ¼ ij
s-1 aij* = area of zone ij is contiguity or connectedness increases
represented by the number of
grids
s = sum of the values in a 3-by-
3 grid template
Elongation index ELONG ¼ 1  ½ aijijs 
a
aij = area (m2) of grid ij ELONG is used to distinguish patches that are linear (narrow) or elongated
(ELONG) asij = area (m2) of smallest
circumscribing circle around
grid ij
Normalized NDVI ¼ NIR - Red NIR = a subset of the infrared NDVI is a normalized transform of the NIR to red reflectance ratio, and it is
NIR þ Red
difference band of the electromagnetic commonly designed to standardize Vegetation Indices values to between 1
vegetation spectrum and +1
index Red = the reflectivity
(NDVI) corresponding to the red
channel
Tree cover TREE ¼ atree
asum
atree = area (m2) of urban forest TREE describes the percent of urban forest coverage
(TREE) coverage
asum = area (m2) of the whole
urban region
6 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
2.2.2. Meteorological indicators
We used the annual averages of relative air humidity and wind
speed for the meteorological indicators. The meteorological data of
all weather stations in the Jing-Jin-Ji Region were obtained from
the China Meteorological Center and were interpolated respec-
tively to raster layers of 30 m resolution using the co-kriging inter-
polation method (Fig. 3). The average in each urban area was used
as the value of the indicator.
2.2.3. Urban heat island intensity
We used the remotely sensed land surface temperature (LST)
data to calculate the UHI intensity. LST are considered as closely
related to the air temperature near the ground, and are widely used
to investigate the spatiotemporal patterns of the urban heat island
effect (Bechtel, 2015; Bechtel et al., 2017; Yao et al., 2018; Yu et al.,
2019a). We used the LST data derived from MOD11A2 in MODIS
datasets for that the satellite has a larger swath width, which can
effectively meet the needs of region-scale cross-section data anal-
ysis and modeling. The data is acquired from the International Sci-
entific & Technical Data Mirror Site of the Computer Network
Information Center in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The errors
of the MODIS LST products are usually within ±1 K according to
previous studies (Wan, 2008; Yao et al., 2018). We also compared
the LST with corresponding air temperature obtained from
weather stations to verify the accuracy of the LST data, following
the method of Yu et al. (2019b), and found that the accuracy is reli-
able (Table S1 in supplementary materials). The cloud-
contaminated area were removed. We acquired the diurnal and
nocturnal LST monthly composites for 2000, 2005, 2010 and
2015 and further processed them into the annual average LST data
for the four years to reflect the overall impacts and match other
annual data.
The UHI intensity (UHII) of each city was calculated based on
the differences between the LST in urban and suburban areas as
shown in Eq. (1) (Oke, 1987):
UHII = LSTurban — LSTsub
where UHII represents the UHI intensity; and LSTurban and LSTsub
represent the LST in urban and suburban areas, respectively. The
calculation was carried out based upon the identified urban areas
and their buffer zones (i.e. suburban areas). The widely used meth-
ods in previous studies for the setting of the buffer radius were to
make the suburban area equal to the urban area (Zhou et al.,
2014; Li et al., 2017), or to adopt a uniform buffer radius of 5 km
or 10 km (Clinton and Gong, 2013; Rasul et al., 2015). However,
the urban areas in the Jing-Jin-Ji Region vary greatly and some cities
are very small. When the buffer radius is too small, e.g. less than
1 km, it can hardly reflect the real temperature of the suburbs and
is also very likely to be affected by the UHI footprint (Yang et al.,
2019). Therefore, we adopted a changing buffer radius combining
the two methods used in the literature and set the minimum and
maximum radii as 5 km and 10 km, respectively, and calculated
the specific buffer radius for each city as Eq. (2):
ðS  Smin Þ
R ¼ Rmin þ ð Rmax  Rmin Þ 
ð Smax  Smin Þ
where R is the buffer radius of the city; Rmin is the smallest buffer
radius, i.e. 5 km; Rmax is the largest buffer radius, i.e. 10 km; S is
the size of the focused urban area; Smax is the largest urban area
in the region; and Smin is the smallest urban area in the region.
2.2.4. Urban development index
Urban development level can be defined from size, demograph-
ics, economics, infrastructural development and other perspectives
(Brown et al., 2004; Vias, 2012; Wang et al., 2012; Wei et al., 2017).
Each perspective reflects different aspects of urban development
that may have important influences on UHI intensity, so we cre-
ated a comprehensive urban development index combining the
size, demographic, economic, and infrastructural characteristics
to classify the urban areas in the Jing-Jin-Ji Region into different
development levels. The urban development index was calculated
as Eq. (3) and for the years 2000, 2005, 2010, and 2015:
 
AREA  POP  NLI
UDI ¼ log 1 þ ð3Þ
1000
where UDI is the urban development index; AREA* is the non-log-
transformed urban size; POP* is the non-log-transformed popula-
tion density; and NLI is the averaged nighttime light intensity. We
chose to multiply the three terms in order to avoid the subjectivity
in the weighting process. We also smoothed the range of the index
via a log transformation and thus eliminated the impacts of some
big cities on the data distribution. We added 1 to the product of
the three indicators to avoid negative results after the log transfor-
mation as well.
2.3. Research methods
2.3.1. Overall relationship between urban form and UHI intensity
We first used the Spearman rank and Pearson correlations to
evaluate the correlation degree between urban form indicators
and the UHI intensity (Gauthier, 2001; Zar, 2005), pooling together
all 600 recordings from 2000 to 2015. Then we carried out a uni-
variate regression between urban form indicators and UHI inten-
sity only for 2015 for comparison. All these methods help to test
the relationship between single variables, but the difference is that
the tested dependencies are linear or non-linear.
The all-subsets multivariate regression method was applied to
take all possible combinations of urban form indicators as indepen-
dent variables in the regression. This method can overcome the
limitations of using all variables or stepwise regression (Krall
ð1Þ et al., 1975) and has been proven to be reliable for estimating coef-
ficients (Kuk, 1984). In spite of this, the panel data model is
believed to be able to better control individual heterogeneity and
take endogeneity problem into account (Almulali, 2012). However,
if T denotes the number of time points and K represents the num-
ber of independent variables, the panel data model has to meet the
requirement that T > K + 1 (Fang et al., 2015). Thus, univariate
panel models were used because T equals four in our study. We
created a fixed-effect model (Eq. (4)) based on the panel data of
the four study years:
UHII = bit UFIit + ki + uit ð4Þ
where UFIit is the urban form index of urban area i at time t; bit is
the slope coefficient; ki is the fixed effects in urban area i, including
geographical location, elevation and other environmental factors;
and uit is the residual error of urban area i at time t. A stability test
and Hausman test were applied to examine the validity of the fixed-
effect model. In the latter two models, all 600 recordings from 2000
to 2015 were used.
ð2Þ
2.3.2. Variation in the relationship between urban form and UHI
intensity along the urban development gradient
The classification of the urban development levels by natural
breaks was carried out by pooling together all 600 recordings of
the urban development index in 2000, 2005, 2010 and 2015. Based
upon the experience obtained in Section 2.3.1, we adopted the
Pearson correlation tests and the univariate linear regression
model in this section for the analysis of the correlation degree
and the slope coefficient between urban form indicators and UHI
intensity at different levels of urban development. In addition,
 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
we created an interaction model (Equation (5)) by adding an inter-
action term between urban form indicators and the urban develop-
ment index into the linear model. A log transformation for each
index was performed to quantify the interaction effect (Zhou
et al., 2017). All 600 recordings from 2000 to 2015 were pooled
together and used in these analyses.
UHII = b1 lnUFI + b2 lnUDI + b3 lnUFI lnUDI + u
where UFI is the urban form indicator, UDI is the urban develop-
ment index and u is a constant item.
2.3.3. Factor contribution analysis along the urban development
gradient
We used the Random Forest (RF) model to estimate the relative
importance of each urban form indicator to UHI intensity. RF
model has the advantage of being able to effectively capture the
complex nonlinear relationship between urban morphological
impacts and UHI intensity to avoid the problem of overfitting
(Breiman, 2001) and to be highly interpretable compared to more
complex black-box models. Furthermore, when multiple variables
are considered simultaneously, the contribution rate of each vari-
able can be reasonably estimated using the RF model (Cutler
et al., 2004). To show this, the decreases of the weighted impurity
p(t)4i (st, t) can be added for all nodes t where Xj is used and aver-
aged over all trees um (for m = 1,. . ., M) in the RF model for predict-
ing Y (Louppe, 2014). By calculating the contribution rate of each
variable to the reduction in impurity, the common contribution
of several variables can be obtained. The equation of the relative
importance assessment is given as Eq. (6):
1 XM X
ImpðX j Þ ¼ 1ðjt ¼ jÞ½pðtÞDiðst ; tÞ
M m¼1 t2u
m increased along the urban development gradient, indicating stron-
where p(t) is the proportion of samples reaching t, and jt denotes
the identifier of the variable used for splitting node t. Here, we
use the Gini index as the impurity function, also known as the Gini
importance (Menze et al., 2009).
3. Results
3.1. Spatiotemporal variances in the UHI intensity and urban form
indicators
The results show that the UHI effect was widely seen in the
Jing-Jin-Ji region from 2000 to 2015, and the urban cool island
was also observed (Fig. 4). The intensity of the UHI effect was gen-
erally increasing, with a median of 0.5 °C in 2000 and approxi-
mately 1 °C in 2015, despite the declining trend in some cities.
Urban morphology became more continuous and complex in gen-
eral, and there was no obvious trend in urban elongation. More-
over, the size of all urban areas was growing and the urban
population density was also increasing.
3.2. Overall relationship between urban form and the UHI intensity
Table 2 summarizes the results of the various models used to
study the overall relationship between urban form indicators and
the UHI intensity, not distinguishing the different levels of urban
development. The selection process of variables in the all-subsets
regression is shown in Fig. S1 in the supplementary materials.
The correlation tests revealed that the urban size indicators (AREA,
POP, NLI) had a strong, positive relationship with the UHI intensity,
followed by the geometry indicators (FRAC, CONTIG, ELONG),
while the vegetation indicators (dNDVI, dTREE) had a negative
relationship with the UHI intensity. Among the geometry indica-
7
tors, the urban elongation index was only weakly correlated with
the UHI intensity.
The results of the all-subsets multivariate regression showed
that all variables passed the collinearity test (VIF < 10). The slope
coefficients obtained in the univariate cross-sectional regression
models were different from those obtained in the all-subsets mul-
tivariate regression and the fixed-effect model. This means the
ð5Þ interactions among different urban form indicators matter.
Through the Hausman test of individual effects, we found that
the results of the fixed-effect panel model were similar to those
of the all-subsets multivariate regression. Most importantly, the
positive or negative signs of the coefficients obtained by different
regression models were identical, suggesting that the selection of
models does not affect the judgment of the positive or negative
effects of urban form indicators on UHI intensity.
In addition, the correlation analysis between meteorological
data and urban form indicators showed that urban areas with
higher complexity (i.e. FRAC) had lower wind speeds (q = 0.20,
p < 0.001), and larger urban areas (i.e. AREA) had lower humidity
(q = 0.19, p < 0.001). This helps to explain the mechanism in the
impacts of urban form on the UHI effect and supports the hypoth-
esis presented in the Introduction (Fig. 1).
3.3. Change patterns of the relationship between urban form indicators
and UHI intensity along the urban development gradient
We first classified the 600 urban samples (150 urban areas in
four years) in the Jing-Jin-Ji region into three urban development
levels. The results of the Pearson correlation tests, the univariate
linear regression models and the interaction models are shown
in Table 3. The results showed that the correlation coefficients
ð6Þ and slope coefficients of POP, CONTIG, FRAC and dNDVI mainly
ger impacts of urban form in these aspects on UHI intensity for
more developed urban areas. However, the correlation coefficients
and the slope coefficients of NLI, ELONG and dTREE mainly
decreased along the urban development gradient, which indicates
weaker impacts on UHI intensity for more developed urban areas.
AREA showed the greatest impact on UHI at the medium develop-
ment level. Moreover, in the models considering the interaction of
the urban development index and urban form indicators, most of
the coefficients of the interaction term were significant and the fit-
ness of the models was improved compared to the univariate linear
regression models. This result further confirmed that urban devel-
opment can affect the relationship between urban form and the
heat island effect.
3.4. Contribution curves across urban development levels
Since the Random Forest model supports good modeling of
smaller samples, we further divided the urban samples into five
and seven levels of urban development for the investigation of
the contribution rates of urban form indicators to UHI intensity
along the urban development gradient. In particular, the number
of the urban areas when classified into seven levels was close to
a normal distribution, and the largest number of urban areas
appeared in the middle level of urban development (Fig. 5a). Every
five years from 2000 to 2015, approximately half of the urban areas
reached a level of development higher than before (Fig. 5b).
Fig. 5c and d show the scatter points of the contribution rates of
urban form indicators to the UHI intensity overlapped with their
fitting curves along the urban development gradient classified into
five and seven levels, respectively. The contribution rates were
summed up according to the dimensions of urban form, namely
the geometry indicators (GEO), the urban size indicators (SIZE)
and the urban vegetation indicators (VEG). To test the robustness
8 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011

Fig. 4. Spatiotemporal distribution of the UHI intensity from 2000 to 2015 in the Jing-Jin-Ji region of China. (a) UHI intensity in 2015; (b) variation in the UHI intensity from
2000 to 2015; and (c) boxplots of the distribution of the UHI intensity and urban form indicators in different years.

Table 2
Results of all statistical models applied to study the relationship between urban form indicators and UHI intensity in the Jing-Jin-Ji region of China.

Cross-sectional Models Panel data models

Correlation tests Univariate All-subsets Multivariate Regression Fixed effect model Stability test Hausman test
(2000–2015) Regression Model Model (2000–2015) (2000–2015)
(2015)
Spearman Pearson R2 Coefficient VIF Coefficient_1 Coefficient_2 R2 Coefficient p value chisq
AREA 0.58 0.59 0.22 0.56*** 4.17 0.19** 0.23*** 0.16 0.55*** P < 0.01 4.06*
POP 0.53 0.55 0.29 0.36*** 2.78 0.12*** 0.12*** 0.19 1.82*** P < 0.01 62.09***
NLI 0.59 0.59 0.15 0.02*** 2.16 0.01*** 0.01*** 0.24 0.02*** P < 0.01 8.12**
FRAC 0.31 0.32 0.07 5.28*** 2.65 1.28 0.02 1.81** P < 0.01 18.29***
CONTIG 0.40 0.40 0.16 20.07*** 3.39 8.89*** 7.79*** 0.03 7.34*** P < 0.01 15.41***
ELONG 0.08 0.06 0.01 0.37 1.74 0.29 0.01 0.36 P < 0.01 3.37
dNDVI 0.24 0.23 0.01 0.62 1.06 0.94*** 0.94*** 0.02 0.77** P < 0.01 5.19*
dTREE 0.21 0.14 0.01 0.80 1.48 1.82*** 1.69*** 0.15 7.00*** P < 0.01 32.57***

Note: * is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed); ** is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed); and *** is significant at the 0.001 level (2-tailed). We ignored the coefficients of
meteorological factors in the all-subsets regression to observe the effect of the urban form factors; Coefficient_1 is the coefficient obtained by the best all-subsets regression
model; and Coefficient_2 is the coefficient obtained by the second best all-subsets regression model.

Table 3
Regression estimations of the urban form impacts on UHI intensity at different levels of urban development in the Jing-Jin-Ji region of China from 2000 to 2015.

Correlation Tests (2000–2015) Univariate Linear Regression Model (2000–2015) Interaction Model (2000–2015)
Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Level 1 Level 2 Level 3 Main effect Main effect Interaction R21 R22
(UFI) (UDI) effect
Coefficient Coefficient Coefficient Coefficient R2 Coefficient R2 Coefficient R2 Coefficient Coefficient Coefficient
AREA 0.24 0.32 0.22 0.41** 0.04 0.56*** 0.08 0.33 *** 0.12 1.03* 1.71*** 0.39** 0.4147 0.4211
POP 0.02 0.25 0.34 0.10 0.01 0.25*** 0.05 0.29** 0.10 0.61** 0.52 0.23** 0.4158 0.4241
NLI 0.40 0.25 0.21 0.02*** 0.19 0.02* 0.06 0.01*** 0.05 0.85* 2.56 0.50** 0.4293 0.4377
FRAC 0.09 0.13 0.16 1.44 0.01 2.38* 0.02 3.52* 0.05 12.82 1.13* 5.80 0.4158 0.4188
CONTIG 0.11 0.18 0.28 3.69 0.01 8.40* 0.02 12.27** 0.07 35.42** 2.44*** 15.53** 0.4145 0.4229
ELONG 0.10 0.07 0.00 0.48 0.01 0.38 0.01 0.12 0.00 3.64* 1.32*** 1.44* 0.4205 0.4253
dNDVI 0.17 0.20 0.27 1.01** 0.03 1.22*** 0.04 1.58* 0.07 1.27 1.65*** 0.91 0.4400 0.4409
dTREE 0.32 0.17 0.20 2.36*** 0.13 2.05* 0.02 1.14 0.01 13.23** 2.20*** 4.91** 0.4586 0.4654

Note: level 1 represents the lowest urban development level and level 3 represents the highest urban development level. R21 is the R squared of the model before adding the
interaction term, while R22 is the R squared of the model after adding the interaction term.
 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011 9

Fig. 5. Number of urban areas and relative contribution rates of urban form indicators across the urban development levels. (a) Number of urban areas at each urban
development level; (b) Change of urban development levels of all urban areas along the time; (c) and (d) change curves of the contribution rate of urban form indicators to
UHI intensity across the urban development gradient classified into five and seven levels, respectively. Each curve is fitted based on the contribution rate results calculated
under one random-state parameter setting. GEO represents urban geometry indicators, SIZE represents the urban size indicators, and VEG represents the urban vegetation
indicators.

of the relative importance of the different dimensions, we set ran-
dom state parameters with the support of the scikit-learning
Python package and drew quadratic curve fitting for the scatter
points of the contribution rates obtained under each parametric
configuration.
The results based upon five development levels (Fig. 5c) and
seven development levels (Fig. 5d) both clearly show three differ-
ent kinds of curves indicating an ascending trend for geometry
indicators, a convex relationship (increasing then decreasing) for
urban size indicators and a declining curve for vegetation indica-
tors. All three types of curves had perfect fitting goodness, with
the average R-square higher than 0.8 (Tables S2 and S3 in supple-
mentary materials). The highly similar and overlapping curves
under different parameter settings demonstrate that our estima-
tion of the relative contribution rate was robust.
4. Discussion
4.1. Confirmation for the effect of urban form on the UHI effect
Compared with previous global or national studies (Peng et al.,
2012; Zhou et al., 2014), this regional-scale study was able to ade-
quately control non-urban variables to highlight the impact of
urban form on UHI effect and shows that the heat island effect is
closely related to scale factors, such as urban size and population
density. In general, our conclusions on the overall positive or neg-
ative relationship between urban form indicators and the heat
island effect were consistent with most previous studies. In terms
of urban geometry, the results have shown that more continuous
and complex cities have stronger UHI intensity, as suggested by
the results of Debbage and Shepherd (2015) and Zhou et al.
(2017). The reason for this may be that the ventilation resistance
between the central and suburban areas increases in more contin-
uous urban areas and results in a stronger UHI effect (Zhao et al.,
2014). More planar, irregular urban edges are also related to a lar-
ger surface aerodynamic roughness in the urban fringe area
because of the existence of the buildings (Ng et al., 2011; Han
et al., 2019; Jacobson et al., 2019; Li et al., 2019; Makvandi et al.,
2019). Moreover, cities with larger FRAC values indicate uncon-
trolled urban sprawling (Yue et al., 2016). This pattern of urban
form was proved to be closely related to increased vehicle kilome-
ters of travel (VKT) and thus more air pollutant (especially green-
house gases) emissions, important influencing factors for urban
climate (Bereitschaft and Debbage, 2013; Fang et al., 2015;
McCarty and Kaza, 2015; Bechle et al., 2017; Fan et al., 2018).
In terms of urban size, the results show that cities with larger
areas, larger population densities and stronger social and economic
activities have stronger UHI intensity, an idea that is consistent
10 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
with most previous studies (Li et al., 2017; Oke, 1973; Ward et al.,
2016; Takebayashi and Senoo, 2018). This may be due to the rise of
the urban size significantly transforming the natural and semi-
natural surface into impervious urban structures. This has dis-
turbed the balance of the Earth0 s surface radiation and energy, as
well as the composition of the atmospheric structure at the near
surface (Oke, 2002; Foley et al., 2005). In the process of urban
expansion, the replacement of surface land cover, change of build-
ing surface materials and color and anthropogenic heat emissions
can all enhance the UHI effect (Yu et al., 2019). Moreover, larger
and denser cities also generally lead to more serious air pollution
or greenhouse gas emissions and poor wind ventilation, which will
also influence heat convection and conduction (Stone and Norman,
2006; Stone, 2008; Guo et al., 2014). UHI intensity shows a positive
correlation with population density because the release of anthro-
pogenic energy is higher in cities with denser population and the
heat diffusion rate of high-density urban buildings is lower than
that of low-density urban buildings (Memon et al., 2009; Sailor,
2011; Manoli et al., 2019). Our results also confirm the cooling
effect of urban vegetation for alleviating the UHI effect. This may
be explained by the transpiration cooling, shade cooling (Jackson
et al., 2008), turbulence cooling (Oke, 1987; Voogt et al., 2003;
Tran et al., 2006; Wan, 2008; Imhoff et al., 2010; Zhao et al.,
2014) and other processes.
It should be noted that this paper used LST-based UHI intensity as
a proxy for the heat island effect. Although the LST differs from the
air temperature (Ta) in terms of magnitude and measurement tech-
niques (Jin and Dickinson, 2010), LST has often been used as a proxy
for air temperature in climate studies because of its wide coverage
and spatial information (Yang et al., 2019). Moreover, many
researchers have used remotely sensed LST as a data source for Ta
estimation (Cresswell et al., 1999; Florio et al., 2004; Mostovoy
et al., 2006; Yoo et al., 2011; Benali et al., 2012) and found a strong
relationship between Ta and remotely sensed LST using statistical
methods (Schwarz et al., 2012; Sohrabinia et al., 2014). In addition,
the direct anthropogenic heat flux by the city at night is believed
to contribute to maintaining the nighttime surface UHI (Memon
et al., 2009; Sailor, 2011). These facts lay a theoretical foundation
for the use of LST-based UHI intensity to measure the impact of
multi-dimensional urban forms on the UHI intensity.
4.2. Insights from the multi-dimensional urban forms and the multi-
model approach
This study provides a comparison among multiple models and
has considered the urban size, geometry and vegetation dimen-
sions of urban form in the regression model. This approach helps
to provide new insights for the examination of the influences of
model selection and, more importantly, it helps the managers to
better understand which urban form dimensions are less costly
and more efficient for the alleviation of the UHI effect.
First, the positive or negative relationships between the urban
form indicators and the UHI intensity are consistent based on the
pooled cross-sectional model and the panel model. However, we
should be wary of using one-period cross-sectional data models
because they may cause an overestimation or underestimation of
some slope coefficients. For example, the coefficient of CONTIG is
far overestimated in one-period cross-sectional model compared
with the panel model and the pooled cross-sectional model. This
problem is caused by endogenous issues and can be solved by
increasing control variables or individual fixation effects
(Wooldridge, 2006). Similarly, a 0.1 increase in FRAC results in an
increase of 0.13 °C (all-subsets regression model) or 0.18 °C
(fixed-effect model) in the UHI effect. However, when we use fewer
variables to perform the cross-sectional data regression, a 0.1 °C
rise in FRAC leads to a 0.53 °C rise in the UHI effect, which is similar
to the results obtained in the European cross-sectional model with
three variables (with a range of approximately 0.42 °C) (Zhou et al.,
2017).
The results also indicate the importance of some specific urban
form categories. It is important to remember that the costs of
improving urban form in different dimensions are enormously dif-
ferent. For example, controlling population density or urban size will
lead to enormous costs of economic development; however, this
costly urban form management may not be necessary. According
to our results for this region, a 10 unit increase in NLI has caused a
0.11–0.20 °C increase in the annual UHI effect and a 10% increase
in area size or population density has caused a 0.01–0.06 °C increase
in UHI intensity. In contrast, a 0.01 unit increase in CONTIG or FRAC
has caused up to a 0.07–0.09 °C or 0.01–0.02 °C increase in the
annual UHII, respectively. In the process of urbanization, controlling
10% of the population growth will have an important social and eco-
nomic impact, while proper control over the continuity or fractal
dimension of urban shape is relatively easy to achieve and may
not lead to large social and economic costs. According to the results,
the average FRAC and CONTIG of the cities in the Jing-Jin-Ji agglom-
eration will increase by about 0.01 when urban development
reaches a higher level. This result implies that it is necessary and
urgent to control urban geometry, for the impact of this change
may even exceed the thermal environmental impact of a 10%
increase in population or area. As for urban vegetation, we have also
shown the tremendous role of urban forests. A 0.1 unit increase in
the dNDVI caused a 0.08–0.10 °C decrease in the annual UHI inten-
sity, while a 0.1 unit increase in dTREE caused a 0.20–0.70 °C
decrease in the annual UHI intensity. Thus, we suggest that greater
consideration should be given to the increase of urban forests cover-
age rather than just grasslands. However, this opinion is also
context-dependent, because cooling effect of urban green vegeta-
tion may be influenced by urbanization level and climate back-
ground (Yu et al., 2018; Yu et al., 2019).
4.3. Interpretation of the changing relationships between urban form
and UHI intensity along the urban development gradient
This study has revealed clear patterns of the relationship
between urban form and UHI intensity along the urban develop-
ment gradient; however, it is still difficult to explain the mecha-
nism of this change because of the lack of sufficient data and
knowledge at the macro-scale of the city. The CONTIG, FRAC, POP
and dNDVI of urban areas have stronger impacts at higher levels
of urban development. This may be related to some basic charac-
teristics of the developed cities as mentioned in the Introduction.
A higher level of urban development corresponds to greater urban
content, more intensive buildings, greater traffic flow, and signifi-
cantly increased intensity of social and economic activities. Big
cities and small cities may experience similar changes in their
overall shape; however, the big cities will lead to more UHI
enhanced effects than the small cities, when more intensive build-
ings affect the ventilation or more traffic increases emissions. This
mechanism seems reasonable for CONTIG, FRAC and POP. In addi-
tion, cities with a higher level of urban development generally have
larger impervious surface areas, drier air and higher temperatures
(Tahir et al., 2014), and these factors all promote the transpiration
of green plants and thus cause urban greening to play a greater
cooling effect in more developed cities.
The other three indicators (NLI, ELONG and dTREE) demonstrate
an opposite change pattern, having weaker impacts on UHI inten-
sity at higher levels of urban development. The downward trend in
the influence of NLI on UHI can be roughly explained by the
impacts of economic growth. For example, carbon emissions and
air pollutant emissions can present an inverted U-shaped curve
along with the urbanization process (Xu and Lin, 2015), especially
 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
in mature urban agglomeration areas (Liu et al., 2018) driven by
industrial upgrading, energy efficiency improvement, etc. (Wang
et al., 2018). In addition, the correlation between ELONG and UHI
intensity is not very strong at some urban development levels,
which is consistent with the existing research (Zhou et al., 2017).
An increase in ELONG will increase the ratio of perimeter to area
and thus enhance the UHI by increasing the complexity of urban
form and traffic burden. However, an increase in ELONG also
means a reduced nearest distance between the city center and
the suburbs and an increased chance of high temperature urban
patches contacting the cold air of the surrounding suburbs. This
mitigation effect counteracts the enhancement effect on UHI inten-
sity in big cities (Table 3). However, more convincing evidence
combining simulation and empirical studies for the counteraction
effect is needed. Furthermore, for urban tree coverage, although
larger forest areas have greater cooling effects, studies also show
that the relationship between the forest areas and the cooling
effects is non-linear. When the forest area increases to a certain
degree, the overall cooling effect of increasing forest area becomes
very weak (Monteiro et al., 2016). Nevertheless, the influences of
urban vegetation on the UHI effect are very complex, and need fur-
ther verification in future studies.
4.4. Implications of relative importance curves
The Random Forest models showed good fitness for each urban
development level and have achieved robust contribution rate
curves because of the full consideration of the interaction and
non-linear relationships among the different indicators. Compared
with previous linear analyses, the results of the Random Forest
model provide new perspectives in understanding the relative
importance between different urban form indicators.
The relative importance of one urban form indicator is directly
affected by the change in the importance of other indicators. Only
the geometry indicators have increasing influence and growing
contribution rates to UHI intensity along the urban development
gradient, indicating that with the development of cities, geometric
features become more effective through interactions with other
factors. The size indicators also have rising importance at the early
stages of urban development, but their relative contribution rate
gradually reaches the inflection point and then begins to decline.
Finally, the vegetation indicators have declining contribution rates
along the urban development gradient. However, since vegetation
transpiration during the day in the summer is one of the most
important factors for mitigating the UHI effect and extreme heat
wave shocks, the strategy of improving urban greening should be
maintained.
The three different contribution rate curves of urban geometry
indicators, size indicators and vegetation indicators provide mean-
ingful insights for policymakers and urban managers. First, primary
attention should be paid to the improvement of urban geometry in
the high levels of urban development; second, it is possible to allevi-
ate the contradiction between urban expansion and UHI mitigation
by regulating other factors; and third, urban greening can play an
important role especially in small cities. Large-scale afforestation
may have an immediate effect on UHI mitigation for small cities
but the effect is inconstant as the cities are developing. Therefore,
rather than relying solely on urban greening, cities with higher
development levels should adopt more diverse methods, especially
the optimization of urban geometry, for UHI mitigation.
4.5. Limitations and further studies
The study has some limitations as follows. First, the resolution
of the MODIS LST data is limited and much coarser than land use
data used in this study. This is acceptable here because most of
11
the urban areas are larger than 10 km2, and the use of MODIS
LST data for cities of similar size has been proved effective in pre-
vious studies on urban heat island (Clinton and Gong, 2013; Cai
et al., 2017). We used the average value of LST in each urban area
for the calculation of UHI intensity, while the land use data for the
calculation of urban geometry indicators. The bias possibly brought
by the difference in the resolution of different data should not have
significant effect on the results because the regression analysis
between urban form indicators and UHI intensity was not carried
out at pixel level. We also verified the accuracy of MODIS LST in
this region with corresponding air temperature from weather sta-
tion. However, for studies of small urban areas or of spatial pattern
within cities, LST retrieved from Landsat images and even ground-
based measurement (air temperature) will provide much higher
resolution and accuracy (Yu et al., 2019a; Yu et al., 2019b).
Second, this paper does not consider temporal variations of the
UHI intensity because we used the annual UHI intensity. Since the
drivers of the UHI effect vary from daily to annual scales (Peng
et al., 2012), it would be interesting to further explore the seasonal
and diurnal variance in the relationships between urban form indi-
cators and the UHI effect. Third, our study uses urban boundaries
derived from land use products to calculate the UHI, and the foot-
print of the heat island effect has not been considered. Since previ-
ous studies have indicated that the footprint of UHI is indeed larger
than a city0 s spatial extent (Yang et al., 2019), eliminating the influ-
ence of the UHI footprint of some large urban areas on the sur-
rounding small urban areas could also be considered in future
studies. Fourth, additional studies combining simulations and
empirical work are needed to obtain a more convincing explana-
tion for the mechanism of the relationship between urban form
and the heat island effect. Additionally, the scope of the sample
observation can be expanded globally to explore the heterogeneity
of the effects of urban form on UHI, such as under different climatic
backgrounds. In particular, because of the large number of urban-
izing cities in China0 s merging urban agglomeration areas (Fang
and Ren, 2017), repeated research in these areas can provide a
good reference for the sustainable development of urban areas
under rapid urbanization around the world to facilitate good urban
form planning.
5. Conclusions
This research reveals clearer and more continuous change pat-
terns of the relationship between the urban form and the UHI
intensity along a comprehensively redefined gradient of urban
development, which provides an interesting and innovative contri-
bution to the understanding of this topic compared with the exist-
ing studies. Based upon the use of multiple models and the
consideration of multiple dimensions of urban form, this study
has specifically evaluated the impacts of urban form on UHI inten-
sity from multiple perspectives including the correlation coeffi-
cients, regression slope coefficients and relative importance.
The results show that urban development, the population den-
sity, the complexity of urban boundaries and the urban vegetation
index are all playing a more and more important role in UHI
enhancement, while the nighttime light index, shape elongation
and forest coverage of cities are growing less influential. The rela-
tive contribution rate curves indicate that the relative contribution
of urban geometry is gradually increasing and should be evaluated
at the advanced level of urban development. However, the relative
contribution of the urban scale presents an inverted U-shaped
curve, implying that controlling urban size or density to alleviate
the heat island effect is not an efficient choice for UHI mitigation,
especially at the advanced development level. The relative contri-
bution of urban vegetation presents a declining trend, but the
12 Z. Liang et al. / Science of the Total Environment 708 (2020) 135011
trend tends to be gentle. Therefore, we suggest that afforestation in
low-level cities can be an important measure to alleviate the heat
island effect; however, with the development of cities, more
diverse types of urban form optimization are required.
The interpretation of the mechanism underlying this change
pattern provides important insights for urban-scale studies about
the complex factors that influence the UHI effect and for urban
managers to make appropriate planning of urban forms and effec-
tive trade-offs in the development of cities.
6. Funding information
The National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award
Number: 41590843
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declared that there is no conflict of interest.
Appendix A. Supplementary material
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135011.
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