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Abstract
Globally, landscape pattern affects geography, ecology and environmental processes in land surfaces. As the crucial factor in the hydrological cycle, crop water requirements (ETc) maintain sustainable agricultural development and the stability of ecological functions, especially for ecologically fragile regions. The potential relationship between ecological landscape pattern and ETc remains unclear. We investigated landscape pattern evolution and the spatiotemporal variation in ETc of representative crops in the North China Plain (NCP) to quantify their relationships. Urbanization and intensive land use have resulted in increased landscape structure complexity and aggregation, and diminished spatial connectedness in the NCP. Patch amount, boundary complexity and maximum patch area showed uptrends over the last 28 years. Landscape pattern in the NCP revealed prominently spatiotemporal heterogeneity in area, shape, structure, spatial distribution and diversity, owing to the spatiotemporal differentiation in land use and the uncertainty of human activities and environmental variables. The annual ETc volumes of winter wheat–summer maize rotation, rice and cotton varied in the range of 815.5265 × 108 to 1032.232 × 108 m3, 79.111 × 108 to 91.6346 × 108 m3 and 30.0284 × 108 to 172.862 × 108 m3, respectively. The influences of landscape pattern on ETc varied with spatial scale. At landscape level, patch amount, structure complexity and aggregation were negatively correlated with ETc, while spatial connectivity and adjacency were positively correlated with that. At crop level, the influences of landscape pattern on ETc varied with crop types, owing to their differing appropriate growing environments. The results can provide theoretical guidance for sustainable ecological landscape planning that aims to save agricultural water and to permit reasonable allocation of water resources in regions of large-scale agricultural development.
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