Dynamic of forest landscape in Heilongjiang Province for one century

Abstract

With the help of GIS tool of ARC/INFO, ARCVIEW and FRAGSTATS, the map of forest resource distribution of Heilongjiang Province was analyzed in 1896, 1949 and 1981. Using total area, mean patch size, patch density, coefficient of patch size variation, mean patch fractal dimension and mean shape index, we studied the change of forest landscape pattern and the change of each patch types in this region. As a result, the total area of forest landscape and mean patch size decreased sharply, the quantity and density of patches increased, the juxtaposition of patches weakened, the shape of patch tended to become regular, and the border of patch simplified. All these showed that the forest landscape of this area tended to fragment gradually, and the fragment of Korean pine forest is the severest. The diversity of whole forest landscape and the evenness of landscape types distribution reduced gradually. Human impact, instead of climate change and forest community succession, is the most important reason for such dramatic changes.