BUILDING A MARINE CADASTRAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FORTHE UNITED STATES - A CASE STUDY

(1) The dynamic changes of regional landscape indices can indicate the transformation of regional ecological functions, meanwhile, these characteristics of transformation changes among various landscape types are beneficial to reveal sustainability of land use and level of regional ecosystem function, to detect out change tendency of regional ecological environment and its inner factors. In this paper, land use change situation of Kitakyushu city in the past 15 years was analyzed by 11 indices. In summary, in view of land use landscape types, obvious difference of indices change existed in different landscape types, which demonstrated that distribution of land use types was inclined to more dispersed, decreasing connectivity among them and complicated spatial pattern. As a result, ecosystem stability of regional landscape and sustainability of land use were reduced. On the other hand, FN index decreased and AWMSI, FD, MPS and LPI increased, which showed land use tended to centralized distribution and complication, human activity enhanced development and exploitation degree of local land. Rising DI, decreasing SHDI and SHEI reflected that land use type appeared non-equalization in the spatial distribution. According to change of these landscape indices, ant-jamming ability of land use landscape and stability of entire ecosystem environment in Kitakyushu city were weakened. It’s evident that the following three reasons resulted in these changes. Firstly, population growth indirectly resulted in increasing of residence land and patch number. Secondly, industrialization and urbanization have been accelerated owing to development of regional economy, which has made land use change more extensively and diversely. Thirdly, policies driving resulted in which the region has been chiefly aiming at economic growth and ignoring reasonable adjustment of land use structure. Based on the above conclusions, it was recommended that mode of land use should be adjusted at landscape scale to rehabilitate and reconstruct the landscape ecosystems in Kitakyushu city.

(2) Transfer matrix of Markov was first applied to analyze change process of land use at different periods. The research results showed the changing tendency for all types of land use into urban construction land was enhanced. To some extent, the study indicated Kitakyushu was still at the rapid urbanization stage. Then, Markov process together with GIS technology was also used to simulate the potential land use changes from 2006 to 2050. According to the results, percentages of farmland and forestland and mountain and urban land will be 4.41%, 5.85%, 31.35% and 52.19%, respectively, of total land area in 2050. Economic efficiency of land use would be improved with the rapid increase of urban land. However, local ecological conditions would be deteriorated by decrease of forestland

(3) The study on the regional landscape pattern change was meaningful to understand dynamic change causes, transformation mechanisms and tendency of land use patterns. During the analysis, disturbance and damage to natural environment by human activities were announced for driving some latent and regular laws against irregular landscape. Meanwhile Markov model was employed to forecast the land use change tendency in the future, forecasting results were valuable for policy decision on the local urban sprawl and ecological conservation. At present, rapid socio-economic development and industrialization, especially in the developing countries, has imposed significant pressure on the land use structure, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and induced instability of ecosystem structure and fragility of ecological environment. Therefore, this research has an important significance to provide theory support for seeking scientific method and reasonable scale of resource to improve regional ecological environment and sustainability of land use.

(4) When landscape analysis was carried out, many proposed indices (such as, number of patch, fragmentation, border density, patches abundance degree, and so on.) were easily influenced by landscape size and researchers’ subjectivity, so that research results often lacked some a certain standard and logical contrast. To conquer these shortages, each of typical characteristic in respect of landscape ecology was synthetically analyzed by applying multiple indices. However, since landscape pattern index is more efficient to show large-scale landscape pattern changes (>1:5000), in the small-scale research fine change extraction of landscape pattern isn’t accurate, in this case, some other methods need to be combined to complete the analysis. In this paper, transformation probability of various land use types during 15 years was forecast by theoretic tendency value calculation of land use variance on Markov model that was a random without aftereffect, which effectively made up the deficiencies by applying the total area changes of various lands to explain their variances. In addition, theoretic tendency value was statistically independent. Therefore, it was appropriate that intertransforming information of land use types was digitized into typical theoretic tendency value for their comparisons, which overcame the disadvantages of their being unable to be directly compared due to different initial years. However, only if condition of dynamic changes is relatively stable, Markov model can more accurately reflect dynamic change of the type. Also, if forecast is a long-term process, different interference conditions will induce different forecast result. Therefore, when employing Markov process, first of all, its application precondition and credibility of forecasting results need to be testified by a large amount of data analysis and evaluation; and then Markov model need to be further amended according to essence and requirement of different detailed study cases.