Assessing the urban eco-environmental quality by the remote-sensing ecological index: Application to Tianjin, North China

The remote-sensing ecological index (RSEI), which is built with greenness, moisture, dryness, and heat, has become increasingly recognized for its use in urban eco-environment quality assessment. To improve the reliability of such assessment, we propose a new RSEI-based urban ecoenvironment quality assessment method where the impact of RSEI indicators on the eco-environment quality and the seasonal change of RSEI are examined and considered. The northern Chinese municipal city of Tianjin was selected as a case study to test the proposed method. Landsat images acquired in spring, summer, autumn, and winter were obtained and processed for three different years (1992, 2005, and 2018) for a multitemporal analysis. Results from the case study show that both the contributions of RSEI indicators to eco-environment quality and RSEI values vary with the season and that such seasonal variability should be considered by normalizing indicator measures differently and using more representative remote-sensing images, respectively. The assessed ecoenvironment quality of Tianjin was, overall, improving owing to governmental environmental protection measures, but the damage caused by rapid urban expansion and sea reclamation in the Binhai New Area still needs to be noted. It is concluded that our proposed urban eco-environment quality assessment method is viable and can provide a reliable assessment result that helps gain a more accurate understanding of the evolution of the urban eco-environment quality over seasons and years.