Land Use Patterns Differentiation Based on Vertical Belts in Qinling Mountains

As water tower for human kind in the 21st century,mountains and their resources and ecology have increasingly become the focus of many studies.The Qinling Mountains serves as the climate boundary between sub-tropical and warm-temperate zone in China.Its vertical belt structure is different between the northern slope and the southern slope,and the state and type of land use accordingly differ greatly.This article makes use of satellite images in summer of 2000 and 1∶250000 digital elevation model(DEM) to acquire the data of land use types distribution on different vertical belts in order to disclose the interrelationship between montane vertical belt and land use.In Qinling Mountains 44.83% of the land is woodland,35.93% is grassland and 18.42% is farmland.Land use change on different vertical belts is obvious.From the base belt to top,the proportion of farmland reduces to zero according to exponential curve,the woodland changes according to plus parabola and the grassland changes in inverse proportion to the woodland.Land use change on the same vertical belts is visible too,especially in Quercu variabilis forest,Q.aliena var.acutiserrata forest and Abies forest.