Socioeconomic-Vegetation Relationships in Urban, Residential Land: The Case of Denver, Colorado

摘要

This research investigates the relationship between socweco-nomic status and remotely sensed vegetation intensity in residential land in the Denver, Colorado metropolitan area. Land-cover data derived from aerial photography and normalized differencevegetation index data (NDVJ) derived from Landsat ETM+ imagery were integrated with U.S. Bureau of the Census tract-level data and analyzed using choropleth mapping and multivariate statistics. Association rule mining, a data mining technique, is used toexplore nonlinear relationships among variables. Results indicate that higher vegetation intensity is associated with socioeconomic advantage in both sparsely populated, large lot suburban developments, as well as in older, urban neighborhoods. This pattern likely reflects residents' ability to pay for the cost of maintaining high vegetation intensity, suburban lawn ecosystem vegetation in a semi-arid grassland environment. Additionally, residential choices may be limited by a home price structure thatis closely related to the concentration of vegetation in the residential landscaping.