Urbanization profoundly impacts the global carbon cycle and climate change. Many studies have shown that both urban vitality and urban carbon emissions are deeply affected by spatial planning and city structure. However, the specific relationship between urban vitality and urban carbon emissions is rarely studied. An index system of urban vitality was established from four aspects: social, economic, cultural, and environmental. After analyzing the spatial distribution characteristics of urban vitality combined with spatial syntax and the TOPSIS model, this paper further investigated the influence of urban vitality-building factors on the distribution of urban carbon emissions based on the Geodetector method. The research results show that: (1) Xuzhou shows obvious spatial differences in urban vitality, mainly decreasing from the center to the surrounding areas, with a small vitality center in the northeast. (2) The impact of different dimensions of vitality on urban carbon emissions is apparently different. (3) Facilities’ aggregation has the weakest explanatory power for urban carbon emissions, while the NDVI has the highest explanatory power. This study helps to clarify the spatial correlation and influence mechanism between urban vitality and urban carbon emissions. Finally, some suggestions are proposed to construct low-carbon and high-vitality cities.

Remote sensing data provide significant information about surface geological features, but they have not been fully investigated as a tool for delineating mineral prospective targets using the latest advancements in machine learning predictive modeling. In this study, besides available geological data (lithology, structure, lineaments), Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, and ASTER multispectral remote sensing data were processed to produce various predictor maps, which then formed four distinct datasets (namely Landsat-8, Sentinel-2, ASTER, and Data-integration). Remote sensing enhancement techniques, including band ratio (BR), principal component analysis (PCA), and minimum noise fraction (MNF), were applied to produce predictor maps related to hydrothermal alteration zones in Hamissana area, while geological-based predictor maps were derived from applying spatial analysis methods. These four datasets were used independently to train a random forest algorithm (RF), which was then employed to conduct data-driven gold mineral prospectivity modeling (MPM) of the study area and compare the capability of different datasets. The modeling results revealed that ASTER and Sentinel-2 datasets achieved very similar accuracy and outperformed Landsat-8 dataset. Based on the area under the ROC curve (AUC), both datasets had the same prediction accuracy of 0.875. However, ASTER dataset yielded the highest overall classification accuracy of 73%, which is 6% higher than Sentinel-2 and 13% higher than Landsat-8. By using the data-integration concept, the prediction accuracy increased by about 6% (AUC: 0.938) compared with the ASTER dataset. Hence, these results suggest that the framework of exploiting remote sensing data is promising and should be used as an alternative technique for MPM in case of data availability issues.

Land cover is important for global change studies, and its accuracy and reliability are usually verified by field sampling, which costs a lot. A method was proposed for the verification of land cover datasets with the geo-tagged natural scene images using a convolutional neural network. The nature scene images were firstly collected from the Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS) and global crowdsourcing images platform Flickr, then classified according to the Land Cover Classification System. The Nature Scene Image Classification (NSIC) model based on the GoogLeNet Inception network for recognition of natural scene images was then constructed. Finally, in the UK, as a verification area, the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative Land Cover (ESA CCI-LC) datasets and the Global land-cover product with fine classification system (GLC-FCS) were verified using the NSIC-Inception model with the nature scene image set. The verification results showed that the overall accuracy verified by LUCAS was very close to the accuracy of the land cover product, which was 94.41% of CCI LC and 92.89% of GLC-FCS, demonstrating the feasibility of using geo-tagged images classified by the NSIC model. In addition, the VGG16 and ResNet50 were compared with GoogLeNet Inception. The differences in verification between LUCAS and Flickr images were discussed regarding the image’s quantity, the spatial distribution, the representativeness, and so on. The uncertainties of verification arising from differences in the spatial resolution of the different datasets were explored by CCI LC and GCL-FCS. The application of the method has great potential to support and improve the efficiency of land cover verification.