Assessing spatial–temporal heterogeneity of China’s landscape fragmentation in 1980–2020

Abstract

Exploring the spatial–temporal heterogeneity of landscape fragmentation contributes to realizing the dynamic evolution of the landscape pattern and understanding the impacts of physical-geographical environment and human activities on landscape systems. Differing from previous studies that focused on using single landscape pattern metrics to characterize the landscape fragmentation, this study proposed a Landscape Fragmentation Index (LFI) to assess and analyze the spatial–temporal heterogeneity of China’s landscape fragmentation in 1980–2020. The result showed that the landscape pattern metrics characterizing patch size, patch shape, patch density, patch type, patch cluster, and patch distance were equipped with obvious phased change characteristics, and all of them have successively undergone the stable phase, fluctuation phase, and adjustment phase. In 1980–2020, China’s LFI was gradually increased to 0.393 from 0.383, annually rising by 0.07 percent points on average. Also, the annual average growth of urbanization rate and GDP respectively reached 1 percent point and 9.26 percent points. Besides, regarding spatial pattern, the landscape fragmentation showed relatively obvious fluctuation features in Southwest-Northeast (Hu Line) and Northwest-Southeast (Bole-Taipei Line) directions and Hu Line was manifested as the dividing line of landscape fragmentation while Bole-Taipei Line was shown as the equilibrium line. Spatial-temporal heterogeneity of China’s landscape fragmentation indicated that the fragmented landscape pattern was the combined effect of the physical-geographical environment and human activity interference.