Dynamic change of landscape pattern in Jiangsu coastal wetland

Based on two periods Landsat TM data, GIS and the statistical methods, basic data about landscape pattern of the study area were obtained from 1997 to 2006. According to the basic data, the dynamic changing of landscape pattern was quantified in recent 10 years by the dynamic analysis of spatial-temporal variation of patches number and areas, landscape pattern indexes and the transformation matrix of landscape patches of different landscapes types. The results showed that: (1) The number of landscape patches increased greatly and the mean area declined obviously. The number of small patches were the absolutely dominant status and large patches were in the dry tree, the area of larger patches (≥10 km2) declined and smaller patches (≤10 km2) increase. (2) The index of landscape diversities and evenness declined, and the index of landscape dominance increased due to the increasing of the gap of landscape patch area. (3) The mutual transformation of landscape types showed that the industrial land and woodland was chiefly transformed into aquiculture land, other land was chiefly transformed into swamp wetland, the aquiculture land was chiefly transformed into cropland from 1997 to 2006. The ingoing areas were more than the outgoing areas of the aquiculture land, traffic land, resident land, water area and cropland as a whole, but the woodland, the industrial land and swamp wetland were quite opposite. (4) The study area was in a greatly unstable state all along, and the complexity of landscape structure grown increasingly. Among all landscape types, swamp wetland, woodland, cropland, industrial land and resident land were the most unstable types, and had a great trend of potential movement.