| Abstract: | The goal of land consolidation in China is still to develop agricultural production. The study of landscapeeffects of land consolidation projects (LCPs) faces many difficulties because of the lack of government's interest anddata. This paper, taking Tianmen City of Hubei Province in Central China as an example, presents a methodology foranalyzing landscape effects of LCPs by GIS and Fragstats3.3. It describes landscape effects with indexes of PatchDensity (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 andless habitat diversity after LCPs. It computes ten landscape indexes of four categories of patches including CultivatedLand, Road, Water Channel, and River and Pond. The indexes show that 1) cultivated land becomes more fragmentalin patch area, less irregular in patch shape and more concentrated in block; 2) the transport capacity of roads and irri-gation and drainage capacity of water channels have been improved; 3) the landscape change of river and pond can besummarized as decreasing scale, more regular shape, reducing connectivity and diversity of the class. LCPs can facili-tate agricultural production as well as protect cultivated land and food security. However, it is doubted that the increaseof cultivated land from LCPs results from the reducing in landscape diversity of water area. |
