Landscape connectivity is the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes the movement of organisms or ecological processes among patches. The maintenance of landscape connectivity is one of the key issues in ecological conservation and construction. The Conversion From Farmland to Forest is a long鄄term ecological project in China.However, along with the rapid urbanization and industrialization in China, the relationships between landscape connectivity and forest restoration has not been fully explored. The emergent questions concern the connectivity of restored forest landscapes, whether or not this connectivity benefits the local flora and fauna, and how to evaluate the importance of agricultural patches that are to be converted prior to the onset of forest restoration.Based on the theory of landscape connectivity, the forest connectivity in Gongyi City, Henan Province is investigated using indicators such as the number of components ( NC) , the integral index of connectivity ( IIC) and the importance value of IIC ( dIIC) . With the help of GIS, we examined how landscape connectivity of the forest in the hilly and low mountain areas varied according to distance threshold values ranging from 50 meters to 10000 meters, and identified the most

In analyzing landscape heterogeneity in a typical area, appropriate selection of characteristic scale is very important. In this paper, Gongyi City, located in mountainous and hilly area of western Henan Province, has been chosen as our study area. Based on 3S technology, the landscape composition and structure of this area are analyzed. Meanwhile, the characteristic scale of landscape heterogeneity is determined by using the semi鄄variable function and moving window method. According to the characteristic scale, we selected two sample lines, which extend from the direction of NW to SE and the direction of NE to SW. These two sampled lines are set to analyze the spatial characteristics of landscape heterogeneity under different disturbances. Finally, the results show that landscape of the study area mainly consists of dry land, construction land, irrigated land, grassland and woodland. Among these landscape types, the dry lands have the largest proportion, accounting for 30. 9% of the whole area, while the irrigation canals have the least area proportion, accounting for 0. 1% of the whole area. Based on the semi鄄variable function and the moving window method, the characteristic scale for analyzing landscape heterogeneity of the study area is 1000 m. Under this characteristic scale, the landscape fragmentation of the study area is mainly concentrated in the valley plain and hilly regions of the southeastern part

Heterogeneity and stability of the agricultural landscape is the premise to maintain the stable and high efficient agricultural ecosystem. Currently, habitat loss and the changes of landscape structure caused by human activities have become the important reason for the loss of biodiversity of the agricultural landscape. Although there are numerous metrics available to investigate the spatial structure of landscape, only little empirical research has examined these metrics to indicate the plant species diversity at several scales. The study area is in Gongyi city which is distributed in the mountainous and hilly areas of Middle鄄Lower Yellow River. We select three types of habitat, such as shrub, plantation and farmland edge to investigate plant species by the typical sample method. These three types of habitat also represent three different disturbance levels. Shrub corresponds to the natural habitat, plantation is under semi鄄Natural habitat, and the farmland

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Landscape connectivity, defined as the degree to which the landscape facilitates or impedes the movement of organisms or ecological processes among patches, has been widely recognized as one of the key objectives in studies of forest landscape management, ecological conservation and construction. The dispersal ability of organisms across changing landscapes is critical for long鄄term biodiversity conservation, and successful dispersal of organisms always depends on the landscape connectivity. The landscape fragmentation caused by roads has significant effects on the landscape pattern and ecological processes, such as the migration of species and biodiversity maintenance in different ecosystems of landscape. This paper aims to analyse the road impact on forest landscape connectivity in mountain area of Gongyi City, Henan Province, China. The landscape connectivity is evaluated based on a graph鄄theory framework, in which a graph represents a landscape as a set of nodes (habitat patches) connected to some degree by edges that join pairs of nodes functionally. Both the graph structure and the habitat availability metrics provide significant improvements for analyzing landscape connectivity and decision making in conservation planning of different ecosystems or landscapes. The geographic data sets for the study area, such as DEM, landuse, soil, vegetation and hydrology, were collected and managed in GIS. Two connectivity indicators, the probability index of connectivity (PC) and the importance value (Percentage of the variation in PC, dPC k) , were calculated. Considering the dispersal distances for different organisms, we examined the variation of landscape connectivity of the woodland in the low and middle mountainous areas according to five distance thresholds: 0.5 km, 1 km,