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Landscape pattern changes of vegetation coverage in Loess Plateau of Northwest China in 2000-2011.

ZHANG Jian-xiang, ZHANG Bo**, YIN Hai-xia, WANG Yuan-yuan, ZHAO Yi-fei   

  1. (College of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou 730070, China)
  • Online:2013-02-10 Published:2013-02-10

Abstract: With the help of RS and GIS, and based on the remote sensing data of MODIS NDVI, this paper analyzed the landscape pattern changes of vegetation coverage in Loess Plateau in the time intervals 2000-2003, 2004-2007, and 2008-2011 and in the each period of summer (early summer, mid summer and late summer). In the past twelve years, the vegetation coverage in the Plateau at landscape level had a great change. The fragmentation and complexity decreased after an initial increase in early summer, but tended to be complicated in mid summer and late summer, i.e., the landscape dominance and the aggregation of the largest patch decreased, the diversity decreased after an initial increase, whereas the landscape connectivity had less change. At coverage type level, the interannual change was mainly manifested in the conversion from medium-low and medium coverage types to mediumhigh and high coverage types, while the low coverage type had a trend of increased first and decreased then, with a small change range of about 3% to 5%. In terms of intra-seasonal variability, the low coverage type continued to decrease, the medium and high coverage types increased obviously, with the maximum increment being 9.76%, the mediumlow coverage type had the largest decrement (13.77%) in midsummer, while the other coverage types had no clear variation trend. The results revealed the landscape pattern changes of vegetation coverage in the Loess Plateau of Northwest China, which could provide references for the construction of local vegetation and the protection of local ecological environment.