Measuring the Multi-Scale Landscape Pattern of China’s Largest Archipelago from a Dual-3D Perspective Based on Remote Sensing

Abstract

Measuring the landscape pattern from a three-dimensional perspective is of great significance for comprehensively revealing the complex spatial characteristics of island ecosystems. However, the archipelago composed of rocky islands has received little attention as its three-dimensional landscape characteristics are difficult to quantify. This study took the largest archipelago in China, the Zhoushan Archipelago, as the study area and constructed an island landscape pattern evaluation model from a dual-three-dimensional (dual-3D) perspective. The model divided the island into upper and lower layers, namely the surface landscape based on topography and the landscape elements above the surface (i.e., vegetation and buildings), and then evaluated their landscape patterns from a three-dimensional perspective, respectively. The landscape pattern model based on a dual-3D perspective and multiple scales achieved excellent results in the archipelago. First, the island landscape pattern was evaluated from three-dimensional perspectives, including human interference, landscape fragmentation, vegetation space, and building space. Second, landscape indices such as the human interference three-dimensional index (HITI), the landscape fragmentation three-dimensional index (LFTI), the vegetation three-dimensional index (VTI), and the building three-dimensional index (BTI) established at multiple spatial scales revealed spatial heterogeneity within and between islands. Environmental factors such as elevation, slope, and island area exhibited significant correlations with them. There were significant differences in landscape pattern indices between the two-dimensional (2D) and the three-dimensional (3D) perspectives, and high values were mainly distributed in areas with significant topographic changes and larger islands. In addition, as the evaluation unit increased, the landscape indices increased, and HITI became more responsive to the transitions from 2D to 3D, while LFTI was the opposite. Therefore, the multiscale landscape pattern measurement of China’s largest archipelago based on high-resolution remote sensing was carried out from three-dimensional perspectives to accurately reveal the spatial heterogeneity.

Keywords

• Island landscape pattern
• Zhoushan Archipelago
• dual-3D
• multi-scale
• spatial heterogeneity