Fractal Analysis of Land Use in China

Mandelbrot enunciated the uncertainty of the length of a coastline in his paper"How long is the coastline of Britain?"published in " Science" in 1967.The fractal concept was presented for the first time in that paper and has been applied to many fields ever since.It is a new method to describe the complexity of nature.Applications of fractal theory to LUCC have involved in calculating of fractal dimensions of different land types,right research methods,fractal description of land structure and its evolution,fractal modeling of regional landscape patterns,etc.Although related studies have been done in such aspects,few references on spatial fractal characters of China's land use and its fractal mechanism have been seen to date.The problem is studied in this paper.At first,the fractal dimensions and stability indexes of spatial structure of different land types of China are calculated.Secondly,the fractal characters of land use structure in eight typical provinces of China,including Beijing,Anhui,Jiangsu,Guangdong,Guizhou,Xinjiang,Tibet,and Liaoning,are analysed,the physical mechanism of spatial fractal structure of land use is also revealed.Finally,it is indicated that patch number and average shape indexes of different regions are the most important factors that influence the land spatial fractal structure.In other words,the land spatial fractal structures of eight provinces are mainly influenced by the geometric characteristic of spatial pattern of land use.