Multi-scale analysis of landscape pattern of Hunan Province

Quantitative analysis of landscape pattern is one important study of landscape ecology, and landscape indexes are simple and quantitative indicators, which highly concentrate landscape pattern information such as composition and spatial configuration. Moreover, the effect of scale is a problem when analyzed and evaluated landscape pattern. Only chose the appropriate scale, can we make the correct analysis and evaluation for landscape pattern. This study takes Hunan Province as the study area. Based on the land use map of Hunan province and the landscape pattern GIS analysis software, we calculated a series of landscape indexes on 17 landscape scales, and tried to reveal how the change of scale impact on landscape pattern and how to choose the appropriate scale for the study area. The results show that landscape indexes are depended on the change of scale. The relationship between landscape indexes and scales can be divided into three categories: monotonically decreasing, monotonically increasing or unimodal changes and irregular changes. In this study, the graph of landscape indexes have multiple inflection points with different scales, and these different landscape indexes have different effects. Considered two important factors: landscape feature information of the study area and the workload in the analysis process, we finally concluded that the suitable scale of landscape pattern analysis is 90m in our study area.