Causes of Changing Woodland Landscape Patterns in Southern China

Forests are composed of landscape spatial units (patches) of different sizes, shapes, and characteristics. The forest landscape pattern and its trends are closely related to resistance to disturbance, restoration, stability, and the biodiversity of the forest landscape and directly influence the benefits and sustainable exploitation of forest landscape resources. Therefore, forest landscape patterns and the driving forces have increasingly attracted the attention of researchers. The present study analyzed the spatial and temporal dynamics of woodland landscape patterns in typical hilly mountainous areas in southern China using ArcGIS, landscape pattern index, and morphological spatial pattern analysis. Meanwhile, a logistic regression model was used to analyze the drivers of woodland change in Anyuan County from three aspects: natural, geographic location, and socio-economic conditions. The total area of woodland decreased during the 10-year study period, with a net decrease of 4959.27 ha, mainly due to conversion into cultivated land, garden land, and construction land. Patch density, edge density, and aggregation index of woodlands increased over time, indicating enhanced fragmentation, stable and complex patch edges, and increased patch connectivity. Conversely, the highest patch index values exhibited decreasing trends, indicating decreases in the dominant patch type. Morphological spatial pattern analysis results showed that the core area was dominant and the islet area increased over time, which also indicates enhanced fragmentation. Forest landscape change is the result of environmental change, ecological processes, and human disturbance, with geographical location and social economy having greater influences on forest landscape change. Human activities such as navel orange cultivation, returning cultivated land to forest, and land occupation for construction were the major factors driving woodland change. The results provide reference that could facilitate forest management and sustainable forest resource utilization.