Abstract
This study aims to clarify the process of landscape change in a semi-mountainous rural area in Tohoku District, Japan. Shizukuishi Basin in Iwate Prefecture was selected as the study area, where agriculture has been highly developed after World War II. For this purpose, a grid blocking method was introduced to quantitatively analyze changes in landscape structure.The grid data set was made from land use and topological maps by 150 m square grids. Each grid had six properties: altitude, slope, and land use in 1912, 1951, 1971 and 1990. Land use in the study area was classified into six major types: paddy fields, upland fields, builtup area, coniferous forests, broadleaved forests and wasteland. Land use blocks were made by clustering adjacent grids which have the same land use type in each data year. Block size, block number, total area and complexity were selected as the indexes of block feature. Change ratios of indexes were calculated in each time period of land use change: period I is 1910 to 1951, II is 1951 to 1971, and III is 1971 to 1990. The ratios were put into a Cluster Analysis to identify block change patterns.In the results, seven patterns of block change, A to G, were identified. Each pattern can be explain by four major processes of block change: appearance of new blocks (pattern A, B, D, F), disappearance of small blocks (pattern E, D), unification of some large blocks (pattern B, C) and division of a few large blocks (pattern E, F, G). Increases in total area go with the appearance and the unification of blocks. Decreases in total area go with the disappearance and the division. Pattern B, that includes paddy fields in period II and III, is explained by both appearance and unification. It suggests that total area of paddy fields increased by these two processes.The results suggest that paddy fields have changed from small patches located only in narrow lowland to a large matrix which occupies the most of the flat area, because paddy field has been the most powerful land use type in the last one hundred years. Landscape structure in Shizukuishi Basin has been changed from mosaic and highly heterogeneous structure to a highly homogeneous structure.
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