Landscape effects of land consolidation projects in Central China - A case study of Tianmen City, Hubei Province

The goal of land consolidation in China is still to develop agricultural production. The study of landscape effects of land consolidation projects (LCPs) faces many difficulties because of the lack of government's interest and data. This paper, taking Tianmen City of Hubei Province in Central China as an example, presents a methodology for analyzing landscape effects of LCPs by GIS and Fragstats3.3. It describes landscape effects with indexes of Patch Density (PD), Largest Patch Index (LPI), Landscape Shape Index (LSI), Interspersion and Juxtaposition Index (IJI), Aggregation Index (At), and Shannon's Diversity Index (SHDI), showing more regular shape, simpler structure and less habitat diversity after LCPs. It computes ten landscape indexes of four categories of patches including Cultivated Land, Road, Water Channel, and River and Pond. The indexes show that 1) cultivated land becomes more fragmental in patch area, less irregular in patch shape and more concentrated in block; 2) the transport capacity of roads and irrigation and drainage capacity of water channels have been improved; 3) the landscape change of river and pond can be summarized as decreasing scale, more regular shape, reducing connectivity and diversity of the class. LCPs can facilitate agricultural production as well as protect cultivated land and food security. However, it is doubted that the increase of cultivated land from LCPs results from the reducing in landscape diversity of water area