Landscape pattern characteristics in Poyang Lake region

Under the support of RS and GIS, the landscape changes were analyzed from 1990 to 2002 in Poyang Lake region. Results indicate that forest, water body, industrial and residential land increase while cultivated land and grassland decrease. The reasons of landscape changes were analyzed by landscape types of secondary land use. The study on land use pattern changes from 1990 to 2002 by adopting landscape indices such as diversity, dominance, fractal dimension and fragmentation demonstrate that diversity and fragmentation increase while dominance and fractal dimension decrease. Finally, the driving forces were quantitatively analyzed using canonical correlation analysis. Results show that population and GDP are the major driving forces for landscape fractal dimension and fragmentation change, while road length and annual net income of farmers are the ones for diversity and dominance change.