Abstract
The development and free distribution of global land cover (GLC) products have greatly assisted in the evolution and analysis of relationships between land cover and landscape pattern. In this study, GlobCover and MCD12Q1 GLC datasets of 2005 and 2009 were comparatively used to analyze the variation of land cover in Anhui Province, China at both the class and landscape scale. The land cover classification schemes of both datasets were firstly reclassified to six types of forestland, grassland, wetland, cropland, artificial area, and others, and then FRAGSTATS was used to calculate the landscape indices. The results showed that from 2005 to 2009, the area density of ‘cropland’ landscape decreased, and it increased for ‘wetland’ and ‘artificial area’. The landscape fragmentation of ‘forestland’ and ‘grassland’ were larger. Moreover, over the same period, the class edge (CE) of ‘cropland’ was diminished; while the CE of ‘wetland’ was enhanced and the aggregation became larger. Conversely, the aggregation and shape complexity of ‘artificial area’ remained the same. The clumpiness index (CLUMPY) of ‘cropland’ varied from 0.8995 to 0.9050, indicating a higher aggregation and more concentrated distribution. The heterogeneity index (HT) value of MCD12Q1 and GlobCover datasets varied, respectively, from 0.9642 to 0.9053 and from 0.8867 to 0.8751, demonstrating that the landscape heterogeneity of Anhui Province was reduced from 2005 to 2009. Driving force analysis (DFA) was just performed for ‘artificial area’, ‘cropland’, and ‘wetland’ according to the 2005–2009 statistical yearbook data, because they were apt to be affected by human activities over a relatively short period of time.
Highlights
Landscape ecology is largely founded on the notion that environmental patterns strongly influence ecological processes [1]
Where gii is the number of like adjacencies between pixels of patch type i based on the double-count method.; gik is the number of adjacencies between pixels of patch type i and k based on the double-count method; Pi is the proportion of the landscape occupied by patch type i; eik is the sum of the edge lengths between the i and k type patches, and m is the number of patch types present in the landscape
It is obvious that the ‘forestland’ area of MCD12Q1 is larger than that of GlobCover, while they have similar values for ‘grassland’, ‘cropland’, ‘wetland’ and ‘artificial area’
Summary
Landscape ecology is largely founded on the notion that environmental patterns strongly influence ecological processes [1]. Many studies have focused on analyzing the characteristics and dynamic changes of landscape patterns in urban-suburban areas, agriculture, forest, dryland, wetland, etc., through various remote sensing imagery. It is obvious that most studies have been performed on the evaluation of landscape pattern and changes therein with respect to a certain land cover type. Some typical GLC products have been widely used to investigate landscape pattern, such as the International Geosphere–Biosphere Program Data and Information Systems (IGBP-DIS) [21], University of Maryland (UMD) [22], Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Collection 5.1 Land Cover type (hereafter referred to as MCD12Q1) [23], GLC2000 [24], GlobCover [25], and GlobeLand30 [26]. The image subsetting and reclassification were completed in ENVI (ENvironment for Visualizing Images)
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