Quantifying the effect of main road construction on landscape change in a rural-urban fringe zone

摘要

From a spatial view, the rural-urban fringe zones are rapidly change areas near big cities. It is evident that the road construction and improvement played an important role in these processes. Quantifying the landscape change of main road on land use is important to elucidate effects in future. We chose an expressway near Beijing as a case, calculated and compared the land use change in 1991 and 2005. Buffer analysis and landscape index methods were used to describe the effect The results showed that patch number, perimeter and perimeter/area ratio varied little in different years while the Shannon diversity index became larger in 2005. And the diversity index increased great with the buffer distance. Also the percentage of land use indicated that the constructed land increased greatly from 1991 to 2005 while water, farmland and forest land decreased. The buffer analysis showed that the constructed land ratio increase with the 0-500 buffer distance which indicated that the road is a potential driving force to change landscape.