Village-level landscape succession and its driving mechanism in the agro-pastoral ecotone of Ningxia, China

Abstract

The relationship between human activities and landscape patterns and its regulation are one of the core fields in landscape ecology. The ecological conditions and local cultures of agro-pastoral ecotone are gradually wea-kening due to environmental fluctuations, land-use characteristics (suitable for both farming and grazing), and unstable policy. Therefore, protecting and restoring this semi-natural landscape and the resulting biological, ecolo-gical and cultural functions are becoming increasingly urgent. Here, by combing remote sensing data with interview survey and geographic investigation, we characterized the landscape changes (1964 to 2019) of Wanjigou Village in Yanchi County of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, which lay within the agro-pastoral ecotone. We further explored the rules of landscape succession and the underlying natural and social mechanism, as well as the interactions between landscape types. Results showed that Wanjigou Village had been subjected to a succession from the landscape characterized by grassland, arable land and sandy land to that characterized by grassland, shrub land, sandy land and arable land. The change from the competition of landscape function separation to the preliminary integration had formed a definite succession path for grassland-arable land-sandy land-shrub land. The main driving factors were a synthesis of policy, human needs, and environment. Policy often promoted landscape change through large-scale and intensified human activities, while environment promoted landscape succession through internal driving force of ecosystem toward a mutual adaption between landscape and the innate conditions. The driving factors of landscape succession were soil moisture variations caused by the change of soil physical structure, and vegetation change in adapting to new environment. In agro-pastoral ecotone with low resource density, the separation of landscape functions was one of the main reasons for land desertification. The integration and coordination of landscape functions greatly alleviated the situation of ecological deterioration. The critical path to maintain sustainable development of agro-pastoral ecotone was to achieve complementation among landscape types and even integrating with external resources by transforming landscape separation competition into landscape symbiosis.