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China has experienced and is experiencing expeditious urban expansion in the recent decades, especially in the coastal areas and big cities. Rapid urban expansion and dramatic changes of landscape have caused great economic, environmental and social impacts consequently. It is crucial to understand urban temporal, spatial expansion patterns and their related effects. In this paper, urban expansion of Guangzhou, a rapid growing city in south-east China, from 1979 to 2003 is studied temporally and spatially. Four time ranges including 1979-1990, 1990-1995, 1995-2000 and 2000-2003 are designed and the urban expansion area, expansion rate and the spatial expansion pattern are discussed by using remote sensing data and Geographical Information System (GIS) tool. Two transects are designed along two axes of Guangzhou expansion and the structural of urban expansion patches at different orientations are compared in order to quantitively understand the urban expansion of Guangzhou during the past 24 years. The gradient analysis integrating multi-temporal data is performed in order to analyze and compare the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban expansion. Two indices of compactness and fractal dimensional index are used to describe the urban developing pattern in the study time durations. And the influence of different types of traffic roads to urban expansion is evaluated using the buffer analysis of GIS. The results show that: (1) temporally, urban area of Guangzhou increase 296.54 km2 from 141.15 km2 in 1979 to 437.70 km2 in 2003 and the increasing rate is up to 210.08%; (2) spatially, Guangzhou has different urban expanding directions in different stages and the general expanding directions are towards northeast, north, southeast and north in four studied time ranges; (3) transportation lines play a very important role in urban expansion of Guangzhou, but different types of road have different impacts. National roads and highways exhibit stronger control to urban expansion than provincial roads; and (4) expansion of Guangzhou has gradually changed from a compact pattern to leapfrogging and disordering patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The highly skewed sex ratio at birth (SRB) in China has stimulated numerous studies. However, the geographic distribution of SRB is seldom investigated, particularly at the county level. The need for an understanding at this level has increased since the Chinese government initiated its 'Care for Girls' campaign to improve the survival rate of females. This campaign has been initiated in a set of pilot counties. In this article we assess the effectiveness of the set of pilot counties in Shandong province and propose two alternate configurations. To do this, we first assess the spatial distribution of the SRB values by county in Shandong, expressed as a z-score (zSRB) after correcting for the biologically expected SRB value and population size of zero-aged children. A local Moran's Ii analysis of the zSRB values indicates a significant high-high cluster in the southwest of the province. The Ii, zSRB and female deficit (the difference of the observed from biologically expected number of zero-aged females) were then used to define two alternate configurations for the pilot counties. A comparison of the current and alternate configurations against a Monte Carlo randomisation analysis shows that the current configuration is significantly different from a random selection (p < 0.05) for the two criteria of maximising the aggregate female deficit and maximising the zSRB. Although this is a good result, both alternate configurations were more significant (p < 0.001), and therefore represent potentially better configurations for the campaign given the criteria used. The spatial analysis approach developed here could be used to improve the effectiveness of the Care-for-Girls campaign in Shandong province, and elsewhere in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]