Abstract: Coherent ecological network (EN) construction has been considered as an important landscape planning strategy for biodiversity conservation, eco-environmental safety management, and resources protection of recreation, history and culture. Its planning and management attract extensive attentions from ordinary people to managers. To identify the key landscape elements is the keystone and the difficulty in EN planning and management. In order to solve this problem, the concept landscape centrality and its measurement were put forward in this paper, based on graph theory and network analysis theory, with its application aspects and framework discussed. It was considered that though the concept landscape centrality could supply a new approach to solve the problems in identifying key landscape elements and building coherent EN, further studies should be made on the ecological significance of centrality indices, analysis of experimental data, and development of simple and universal software, aimed to validate and improve this approach.

Key words: landscape centrality, ecological network, key landscape element, landscape planning, landscape management, graph theory, wheat/maize intercropping, crops, photosynthetically active radiation, photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) interception, geometrical model, Hetao Irrigation District.