Landscape pattern changes of subtropical central China have been concerned due to rice cultivation for at least 8,000 years and tea plantation for more than 5,000 years in subtropical central China. The research of reasons of Landscape changes, i.e., driving forces analysis (such as biophysical factors, socio-economic drivers and proximate causes), is prerequisite for understanding the relationships between human activates and natural environments in this region.

Recent landscape changes have been both rapid and dramatic in subtropical central China, and threaten to reduce the number and quality of ecosystem services and goods, including soil loss, non-point source pollution, weather changes, and species extinction. To solve the problems resulting from landscape changes, a quantitative measure of the historic range of variability in landscape structure and composition is necessary to be researched. A catchment is a geophysical functional region, which is widely used in hydrology and ecology. Catchment has also been advocated as an appropriate unit for ecological planning. The upper Jinjing river catchment is a typical landscape of the hilly red soil region of southern China, 70 km north of Changsha, was been chose to research its LUCC and driving forces.

Using landscape indices analysis, the classification and regression tree methods and random forest methods, a team of researchers from China Agricultural University, the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISA) spent 3 years to estimate the landscape pattern changes and its driving forces from 1933 to 2005 in the upper Jinjing river catchment in subtropical central China.

The researchers found that a major landscape pattern has been established since 1933. A moderate changing trend, the decrease of woodland resulting from the increase of paddy field, was also observed. From 1933 to 2005, 1,270 ha of woodland were converted to paddy field, accounting for 13% of the woodland present in 1933. An analysis of landscape indices demonstrated that the catchment landscape became more heterogeneous from 1933 to 1990, and that the patch fragmenting trend has remained fairly stable since 1990. The predominant driving forces for the land use changes were found to be the terrain and the governmental policies. Climate change and anthropogenic activities (e.g., rapid population growth and migration) may also be important factors that have impacted the landscape changes of the studied catchment.

This research was financially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (2012CB417105, 2011CB100506), the CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Program for Creative Research Team (KZCX2-YW-T07, 20100491005-8) and the CAS 100-Talents Program.

The study entitled “Landscape pattern changes at the catchment scale: a case study in the upper Jinjing river catchment in subtropical central China from 1933 to 2005” has been published in Volume 10, Issue 2, 2014 of Landscape and ecological engineering, details could be found:http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11355-013-0221-z.