Assessment of landscape ecology of agricultural protection forest system at Beizang Town, Daxing County, Beijing

Abstract

Based on theories of protective forests and landscape ecology, the reasonableness of structures and patterns of shelterbelt system at Beizang Town, Daxing County, Beijing were analyzed and assessed from the two scales of forest belts and networks, by integrating uses of field investigation, GIS and RS techniques. Results showed that the existent main belt (3–12 m in width) was too narrow, while the assistant belt (3–27.1 m in width) was too wide; the species composition of the existent shelterbelts was single, and the structures and patterns of the shelterbelt system were unreasonable. It is suggested that the structure of the main and the assistant belts should be changed, such as increasing the width of main belts, decreasing the width of assistant belt, and planting more mixed species, and the pattern with arbores in the middle and shrubs in the sides of belts could be taken into account. For the landscape structure of forest network after regenerating or reconstruction, the grid number of closed network should be 13 per km² and the minimum number of belts should be 34 per km². This study also testified that integrating GIS and remote technique with landscape ecology could provide an effective method for reasonable reconstruction of the structures and patterns of shelterbelts system.