Abstract
Nature reserves play an essential role in protecting natural resources and maintaining an ecological balance. However, certain nature reserves are increasingly disturbed by human activities in the form of settlements, roads, farmland, etc. How to monitor the status of nature reserves by using remote sensing methods has been a focus of scholars for a long time. In this study, remote sensing satellite images from 2009 and 2014 were used to extract and analyze the distribution of anthropogenic activities, such as agriculture, industry, residency, traffic, and other human activities. On this basis, the Nature Reserve Human Interference (NRHI) and landscape indices (LI) were calculated to describe the intensity of anthropogenic disturbance; in addition, the slope and aspect were analyzed to describe the regularity in the distribution of anthropogenic activities. The results showed that more than 90% of the anthropogenic activity occurred in the experimental and buffer zones. Likewise, the NRHI increased from 0.0901 in 2009 to 0.1127 in 2014. The NRHI was proportional to the patch density (PD), landscape shape index (LSI), landscape division index (DIVISION), Shannon’s diversity index (SHDI), and Shannon′s evenness index (SHEI), and it was inversely proportional to the contagion index (CONTAG). Moreover, 84.54% of the anthropogenic activity occurred in a range from 0 to 3.6 degrees, and 14.44% of the activity occurred in a range from 3.6 to 7.2 degrees. More than 60% of the anthropogenic activity occurred on sunny slopes because of the human adaptability to the environment and the possibility for humans to fulfill their physical needs (warmth and comfort). Thus, the monitoring of this nature reserve needs to be further strengthened and focused on the area with a range of 0–7.2 degrees and on the sunny slopes.
Highlights
Increasing evidence has revealed that Earth ecosystems have been affected by anthropogenic activities [1,2,3,4]
Human Interference in the Nature Reserve where the Nature Reserve Human Interference (NRHI) is the impact index of human activities in a nature reserve; xi is the area of the different types of human activities; X is the total area of the nature reserve; ai is the weight of each functional zone; and bi is the weight of type i human activity
The results of the classification indicate that the extracted human activities (Figure 2) including agricultural land, industrial land, residential land, traffic land, and other human activities in the Baijitan National Nature Reserve
Summary
Increasing evidence has revealed that Earth ecosystems have been affected by anthropogenic activities [1,2,3,4]. Because of the rapid development of the national economy and the increasing demands on natural resources, there are still certain nature reserves that are disturbed by anthropogenic activities to various degrees, such as expanding settlements, agricultural activities, road construction, and mining developments [8,9,10]. A highly accurate human activity disturbance index can be achieved using high-resolution remote sensing images. The qualitative relationship between the landscape index and the intensity of human disturbances should be well understood because human activities will lead to major landscape structural changes, which may cause habitat loss in nature reserves, do harm to the ecological system and exert a serious threat to biological diversity of nature reserves [25]. We selected the Baijitan National Nature Reserve as the study area and selected GF-1 remote sensing images as the main data source. A comparative landscape pattern analysis was performed using RS satellite images from 2009 and 2014, which were used to qualitatively analyze the landscape and the intensity of human disturbances
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