Abstract
The sustainable management of peri-urban agriculture requires cultivated land to not only be a source of food production, but also contribute ecological resources. This paper presents a method for assessing the landscape ecological security (LES) of peri-urban cultivated land that considers both cultivated landscape and interactions with the surrounding landscape. The situation in Changchun City was assessed at three time nodes. Furthermore, its spatiotemporal variations in several landscape characteristics were also measured. The results suggest that the peri-urban cultivated landscape was affected to varying extents by urbanization. The metrics of PD (patch density), ED (edge density), AWMSI (area-weighted mean shape index), FRAC (fractal dimension) and DIVISION (landscape division index) progressively increased during urbanization for cultivated land within 20 km of the urban gravity center. Elevated fragmentation and vulnerability of the cultivated landscape was also detected. The traditional method for quantifying LES of cultivated land neglects interactions with other landscape types. When the impacts of the ecological and construction landscapes were included, the results better reflected the dynamics of cultivated landscape in a peri-urban area. Decreased LES of cultivated land poses an impediment to the sustainable peri-urban agriculture, and better management practices should be applied for maintaining the LES of peri-urban cultivated land resources.
Highlights
It is well established that cultivated land resources provide diverse ecosystem services such as soil conservation, biodiversity protection and climate regulation [1,2,3]
Forest land and water were mostly located in the southeast of Changchun City, which indicated abundant ecological land resources in this area
This paper developed a method for assessing the landscape ecological security (LES) of peri-urban cultivated land that considers both cultivated landscape and interactions with the surrounding landscape
Summary
It is well established that cultivated land resources provide diverse ecosystem services such as soil conservation, biodiversity protection and climate regulation [1,2,3]. Cultivated lands are pivotal to balancing regional ecological equilibrium with the intense competition for land space between urban development and farmland preservation. This leaves little space for ecological land, such as forest land and grassland [4,5]. This phenomenon is common at the rural-urban fringe, namely the Desakota area [6,7]. The sustainable management of peri-urban agriculture requires cultivated land to be a site of food production, but to serve as a means for conserving ecological resources [10,11]
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