Proceedings Article | 13 September 2005
KEYWORDS: Ecosystems, Remote sensing, Carbon, Data modeling, Geographic information systems, Agriculture, Statistical analysis, Statistical modeling, Analytical research, Ecology
Forest is the main body of the land ecosystem. As key part of boreal forest in Eurasia, forest in the northeast China plays
an important role in maintaining global carbon cycle and regional ecology security. The northeast China is the highest forest
coverage ratio area in China, the forest coverage ratio in total area doesn't change much since reform and opening of China,
but the spatial distribution of forest cover changes is in regional difference explicitly. Base on land use data of three period
(1986a, 1996a, 2000a) remote sensing image, the research applying statistical analysis models and spatial analysis models,
analyzed the forest cover change types, landscape characteristics and spatial distribution pattern from the middle of 1980s to
2000. The research result show that:
(1) From 1980s, the main forest cover changes in northeast China was in interchange of forestland and cropland, and
interchange of forestland and grassland. Among them, the forested land change plays mainly part, and deforest area is bigger
than reforest one.
(2) From 1980s, despite the forestland area decreases every year in northeast China, landscape pattern didn't change much,
forestland is the main part of landscape, the degree of forest landscape fragmentation dropped every year. It shows that forest
cover changes frequently take place at the edge of forest, which indicates that a neighborhood relation plays an important role
in the forestland changes.
(3) From 1980s, forest cover changes in northeast China most happened in hilly land at about 400m height, and took on
obvious zonality in horizontal distribution: degree of forest cover change dropped off from south and north to middle, the
degree of reforest dropped off from south to north, and the degree of deforest dropped off from north to south.
