Fractal characteristics of regional land use/land cover based on GIS technique

Based on the geographic information system(GIS) and the remote sensing data, the calculation scripts and significances of patch shape fractal dimensions, spatial structure box dimensions, spatial distribution information dimensions and regional morphology radial dimensions of the regional land use/land cover was studied in this paper, and Chanba river watershed on Xi’an City was took as an example. The results show that patch shape fractal dimension, spatial structure box dimension, spatial distribution information dimension and regional morphology radial dimension have different form and function to describe the feature and properties of the regional land use/land cover, which can indicate the fractal characteristics of regional land use/land cover in patch-level, class-level and landscape-level. Patch shape fractal dimension can reflect the complexity of patch shape and the jamming intensity of artificial activity for different land types. Spatial structure box dimension can reveal the complexity and irregularity of spatial structure for different land types. Spatial distribution information dimension can mirror the uniformity of spatial distribution for different land types. Regional morphology radial dimension can describe the spatial aggregate feature of regional morphology.