Landscape Pattern and Its Productivity of the Desert LandscapeEcosystem in Hexi Corridor of Gansu

Abstract

This paper studies on space structure and productivity characteristic of desert landscape in Linze using GIS. The results show: the desert landscape ecosystem of Linze is made up of 4 foundational elements including rocky desert, sandy desert, conglental desert and road. Among them, conglental desert has the largest area and highest connectivity, so it is the matrix of the desert landscape ecosystem; road is the only one kind of corridor, its corridor density is 37.66 m/km2; rocky desert and sandy desert are two kinds of patch types. The genetic type of matrix is belong to environment resource type, and the genetic type of patches have 2 types: rocky desert is rudimental patches type and sandy desert is disturbance type. For the productivity, rocky desert has the highest above ground biomass, which is 6.89 times of conglental desert, 28.81 times of sandy desert; the above ground biomass of conglental desert is about 14.51% of rocky desert, and is 4.18% times of sandy desert; sandy desert has the lowest above ground biomass which is 3.47% and 23.91% of rocky desert and conglental desert respectively. The differences vegetation types in different desert are not obvious, but due to the great differences in the variation of local water and heat, the plant density changes greatly, resulting in the significant difference in their productivity.