Environmental Modelling of Coastal Cities: Urban Landscapes as Complex, Vulnerable and Dynamically Developing Structures

International audienceThe study area is focused on the coastal city of Taipei. Since past decades, Taipei undergone serious urban changes as residential structure of the vacant land areas is developing and requires modifications. The development of urban landscapes in Taipei has unique feature; that is, the Taiwan’s exceptional economic and industrial growth since 1980s, which is often referred as «industrial wonder of Taiwan». The country quickly transformed from an agriculture- based traditional economy into a highly industrialized society. As a result, Taiwan has now a new face of high-technology oriented, economically restructured economy, which is a part of the global network of economies and capitals, playing important role both in the Asia–Pacific region and in the global production chains. Necessarily, this caused notable changes in the face of the country, modifying both its social and natural landscape patterns. Thus, Taiwan is nowadays a highly urbanized country with almost 80% of the total population of Taiwan living in urban areas. However, intensive urbanization necessarily create new conditions for human-nature co-existence, since rapidly growing city and high urbanization rate affect biodiversity and ecosystems sustainability in the coastal area. The process of urbanization includes transformation of landscapes: natural land cover types, typical for the area are being modified into artificial surfaces and the area of city enlarges. At the same time, Taiwan Island has unique natural landscapes with high environmental value, outstanding natural beauty, rare and extinct species. The landscape diversity is higher in the rural and less urbanized areas, while it increases in the urban areas due to the domination of the human-induced landscape types and reduced number of natural patches within the city. The environmental changes of the city were detected by geospatial analysis of the satellite images. The areas occupied by different landscape types were calculated and analyzed. It was detected that various districts were developing with different rate and intensity due to the complex factors of both human and ecological origin. The results showed urban development, decline of green areas, increase of urban spaces since 1990