[Analysis on landscape pattern in the Tuoketuo region of Inner Mongolia]

The Tuoketuo region is located in the middle reach of Yellow River, farming-pastoral zone in Inner Mongolia. In this paper, the vegetation map of study area was compiled by combining TM image and field vegetation survey. Applying several landscape pattern indices such patch size, number, perimeter density, diversity index, evenness index and fragmentation index etc., the landscape pattern of the Tuoketuo region was analyzed on a GIS platform. The result showed that the landscape types in Tuoketuo region mainly consisted of farmland, artificial forest and grassland. The area of farmland was 281.72 km2 and accounted for 33.64% of study region, artificial forest was 22.0%, and grassland was 6.65%. The landscape matrix in northeast part of study area was farmland. On the farmland matrix, Populus + Ulmus patches distributed with centering of residential spot, there were 89 patches. The patch density was 2.568 patch.km-2, and the mean patch area of Populus + Ulmus was only 0.39 km2, therefore, the characteristics of matrix and patch was very typical. Perimeter density of Populus + Ulmus and hill-gully were higher than other landscape types, indicating that the fragmentation degree of the former was higher, and hill-gulf was cut seriously in study area. All of these results emphasize that human activity had a strong impact on the landscape pattern in the Tuoketuo region.