Abstract
Taking Chongqing Liangjiang new district within second-ring road as researching area, analyzed its land use and landscape pattern changes during 1988, 2001 and 2010. After utilizing ENVI to do the remote sensing images interpretation, land use changes were described in conversion matrix. Method of FRAGSTATS was utilized to calculate the special landscape indices, which included patch density (PD), largest patch index (LPI), land shape index (LSI), contagion (CONTAG), landscape division index (DIVISION), aggregation index (AI). Results show Land use types change from farmland to urban mostly during 2001 to 2010; PD, LPI and LSI drop down, the other three have increasing tendency. Land use and landscape pattern associate with each other, Urbanization featured with human activities, causes landscape changes, besides, preferential policies of Conversion of cropland to forest, urban planning and the typical “Three Reforms” in Chongqing boosts land cover changes too.
Highlights
Chinese cities have experienced rapid population growth and continuous expansion, resulting in considerable and sustained demand for land resources
Our results demonstrate that both land use changes and landscape indices changes are much more significant from 2001 to 2010, when urban area has replaced agrarian covers mostly
Farmland is much fragmented than urban area, which means more small patches contained in former imagery, value of patch density (PD) drops when some arable land transfers to urban and becomes part of CBD
Summary
Chinese cities have experienced rapid population growth and continuous expansion, resulting in considerable and sustained demand for land resources. Urbanization has imposed significant pressure on the land-use structure, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, of these areas (Liu et al, 2007). The changes in land use caused by urbanization greatly affect the structure and function of urban ecosystems (Zhou & Cadenasso, 2011). Land-use structure was associated well with landscape pattern in structural elements, the quantification of landscape structure is not a new topic (Forman & Godron, 1986; O’Neill, 1988), this field is still evolving due to the ongoing developments in geo information technology (Gardner, Lookingbill, Townsend & Epprecht, 2009; Riitters, Vogt, Soille & Estreguil, 2009; Saura & Castro, 2007). Most theories of urban landscape patterns changes focus on plaint cities, different terrains have huge impacts on landscape structures (Ispikoudis, Lyrintzis & Kyriakakis, 1993; Hobbs, 1993; Pignatti, 1993), which means hilly cities show uniqueness in land use and landscape patterns changes, its features need special analysis
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