Possibilities of land use change analysis in a mountainous rural area: a methodological approach

Decreasing population density is a current trend in the European Union, and causes a lower environmental impact on the landscape. However, besides the desirable effect on the regeneration processes of semi-natural forest ecosystems, the lack of traditional management techniques can also lead to detrimental ecological processes. In this study we investigated the land use pattern changes in a micro-region (in North-Eastern Hungary) between 1952 and 2005, based on vectorised land use data from archive aerial photos. We also evaluated the methodology of comparisons using GIS methods, fuzzy sets and landscape metrics. We found that both GIS methods and statistical analysis of landscape metrics resulted in more or less the same findings. Differences were not as relevant as was expected considering the general tendencies of the past 60 years in Hungary. The change in the annual rate of forest recovery was 0.12%; settlements extended their area by an annual rate of 3.04%, while grasslands and arable lands had a net loss in their area within the studied period (0.60% and 0.89%, respectively). The kappa index showed a smaller similarity (~60%) between these dates but the fuzzy kappa and the aggregation index, taking into account both spatial and thematic errors, gave a more reliable result (~70–80% similarity). Landscape metrics on patch and class level ensured the possibility of a detailed analysis. We arrived at a similar outcome but were able to verify all the calculations through statistical tests. With this approach we were able to reveal significant (p < 0.05) changes; however, effect sizes did not show large magnitudes. Comparing the methods of revealing landscape change, the approach of landscape metrics was the most effective approach, as it was independent of spatial errors and ensuring a multiple way of interpretation.     

Unsupervised regionalization of the United States into landscape pattern types

We present a pattern-based regionalization of the conterminous US – a partitioning of the country into a number of mutually exclusive and exhaustive regions that maximizes the intra-region stationarity of land cover patterns and inter-region disparity between those patterns. The result is a discretization of the land surface into a number of landscape pattern types (LPTs) – spatial units each containing a unique quasi-stationary pattern of land cover classes. To achieve this goal, we use a recently developed method which utilizes machine vision techniques. First, the entire National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD) is partitioned into a grid of square-size blocks of cells, called motifels. The size of a motifel defines the spatial scale of a local landscape. The land cover classes of cells within a motifel form a local landscape pattern which is mathematically represented by a histogram of co-occurrence features. Using the Jensen–Shannon divergence as a dissimilarity function between patterns we group the motifels into several LPTs. The grouping procedure consists of two phases. First, the grid of motifels is partitioned spatially using a region-growing segmentation algorithm. Then, the resulting segments of this grid, each represented by its medoid, are clustered using a hierarchical algorithm with Ward’s linkage. The broad-extent maps of progressively more generalized LPTs resulting from this procedure are shown and discussed. Our delineated LPTs agree well with the perceptual patterns seen in the NLCD map.     

Spatiotemporal change patterns of urban lakes in China’s major cities between 1990 and 2015

China has experienced unprecedented urbanization in the past decades, resulting in dramatic changes in the physical, limnological, and hydrological characteristics of lakes in urban landscapes. However, the spatiotemporal dynamics in distribution and abundance of urban lakes in China remain poorly understood. Here, we characterized the spatiotemporal change patterns of urban lakes in China’s major cities between 1990 and 2015 using remote-sensing data and landscape metrics. The results showed that the urban lake landscape patterns have experienced drastic changes over the past 25 years. The total surface area of the urban lakes has decreased by 17,620.02?ha, a decrease of 24.22%, with a significant increase in the landscape fragmentation and a reduction in shape complexity. We defined three lake-shrinkage types and found that vanishment was the most common lake-shrinkage pattern, followed by edge-shrinkage and tunneling in terms of lake area. Moreover, we also found that urban sprawl was the dominant driver of the lake shrinkage, accounting for 67.89% of the total area loss, and the transition from lakes to cropland was also an important factor (19.86%). This study has potential for providing critical baseline information for government decision-making in lake resources management and urban landscape design.     

Modelling coastal land use change by incorporating spatial autocorrelation into cellular automata models

This paper presents a spatial autoregressive (SAR) method-based cellular automata (termed SAR-CA) model to simulate coastal land use change, by incorporating spatial autocorrelation into transition rules. The model captures the spatial relationships between explained and explanatory variables and then integrates them into CA transition rules. A conventional CA model (LogCA) based on logistic regression (LR) was studied as a comparison. These two CA models were applied to simulate urban land use change of coastal regions in Ningbo of China from 2000 to 2015. Compared to the LR method, the SAR model yielded smaller accumulated residuals that showed a random distribution in fitting the CA transition rules. The better-fitting SAR model performed well in simulating urban land use change and scored an overall accuracy of 85.3%, improving on the LogCA model by 3.6%. Landscape metrics showed that the pattern generated by the SAR-CA model has less difference with the observed pattern.     

基于GIS的农村居民点分布特征及景观格局研究——以揭阳市为例

农村居民点作为乡村区域空间人口集聚形态的一种表现,是构成乡村聚落景观的一个重要部分,对其特征的分析研究对于推动城乡一体化建设和美丽乡村建设等政策的理论研究和实践开展和促进农村土地节约集约利用有重要意义.运用Ripley's K函数和ArcGIS 10.2中的核密度法来研究广东省揭阳市农村居民点的空间分布特征,建立河流和...     

3S技术在神农架滑雪场生态环境影响评价中的应用

神农架滑雪场位于国家级自然保护区的边缘地带。运用景观生态学原理和方法,采用3S技术,对滑雪场景观生态体系的结构和功能状况进行评价,通过景观多样性指数、景观聚集度指数等指标量化计算及比较分析,预测了项目建成后对所在区域生态完整性的影响程度及将造成的敏感生态问题。结果表明,评价区自然系统的生物量将减少430.26 t,平均净生产力降低为881.55 g/m2.a,项目建设不会改变林地的模地地位,其对生态环境质量仍有较强的调控能力。3S技术结合景观生态学方法将生态环境影响评价由定性评价转向定量预测,为建设项目生态影响评价研究作了有益的探索。     

基于PPGIS的乡村旅游社区景观价值变化研究——以丽江束河古镇为例

景观价值是人对环境的主观感知和效用评价,景观价值变化的研究能够帮助理解旅游社区的社会现象.以丽江束河古镇为例,采用参与式制图与半结构化访谈方法调查当地居民对旅游开发前后的感知景观价值,最终获取的有效问卷与填图为293份,提取空间数据点658个.通过对访谈结果进行编码和归纳得到旅游开发前后各7种景观价值类型.采用质性分析...     

Landscape Dynamics and Driving Factors in Da＇an County of Jilin Province in Northeast China During 1956-2000

The landscape pattern of Da＇an County, Northeast China has undergone significant changes since the 1950s as a result of climatic change and human activities. The aim of this paper is to quantitatively study landscape pattern and its spatial dynamics of Da＇an County at the landscape level over the nearly 50-year span. Patch dynamics were examined according to land use and land cover change processes built from a series of images, as well as topographic maps, and temporal patterns built from landscape pattern metrics. The transition matrix of landscape patch types and changes of various landscape metrics were applied. The results showed that, from 1956 to 2000, the landscape within the study area had undertaken a complicated evolution in landscape structure and composition. The outstanding characteristic is that saline-alkali land increased and grassland decreased. As some smaller patches amalgamated, the heterogeneity of patch decreased. All those changes were the synthetic result of both climatic and anthropogenic influences, but the predominant factor was different in different parts. In the southern part of the study area, the landscape pattern changes resulted from the modification of climate obviously, while in the northern part, the landscape pattern changes were mainly caused by human activities, such as the conversion between farmland and saline-alkali land. This phenomenon showed that human activities played more important role in the north than in the south of Da＇an County.     

Landscape Effects of Land Consolidation Projects in Central China——A Case Study of Tianmen City,Hubei Province

The goal of land consolidation in China is still to develop agricultural production. The study of landscape effects of land consolidation projects （LCPs） faces many difficulties because of the lack of government＇s interest and data. This paper, taking Tianmen City of Hubei Province in Central China as an example, presents a methodology for analyzing landscape effects of LCPs by GIS and Fragstats3.3. It describes landscape effects with indexes of Patch Density （PD）, Largest Patch Index （LPI）, Landscape Shape Index （LSI）, Interspersion and Juxtaposition Index （IJI）, Aggregation Index （AI）, and Shannon＇s Diversity Index （SHDI）, showing more regular shape, simpler structure and less habitat diversity after LCPs. It computes ten landscape indexes of four categories of patches including Cultivated Land, Road, Water Channel, and River and Pond. The indexes show that 1） cultivated land becomes more fragmental in patch area, less irregular in patch shape and more concentrated in block; 2） the transport capacity of roads and irrigation and drainage capacity of water channels have been improved; 3） the landscape change of river and pond can be summarized as decreasing scale, more regular shape, reducing connectivity and diversity of the class. LCPs can facilitate agricultural production as well as protect cultivated land and food security. However, it is doubted that the increase of cultivated land from LCPs results from the reducing in landscape diversity of water area.     

基于遥感的城市景观生态环境格局分析

借助RS和GIS技术,获取研究区城市的景观生态格局指标,运用定量分析的方法对各种生态类型在城市化进程中对景观格局的作用进行了研究。揭示了部分生态类型持续减少将对生态平衡造成破坏的情况,为城市的职能部门提出生态环境建设的建议和措施。