Land Use Analysis on Guilan Central District Using Landscape Ecology Approach

Landscape condition is one of the key elements of selecting habitat, activity and people's satisfaction. Land use/ cover has had many changes during last years, due to population growth and people's belief. These changes are very sensible and consistently because of climate situation, maritime boundary, relatively high population growth rate, immigration and finally population & construction densities. Land cover changes have been resulted to fragmentation, perforation, dissection, shrinkage, attrition and coalescence of landscape. Environmental changes occur with further speed and broader scale by human society distribution and mastery over the environment. Therefore, Landscape data are necessary for manage and planning and natural sustainable ordering of ecosystem. Landscape metrics as a quantitative tool can recognize characteristics of landscape composition and configuration. In this paper, metrics of locational distribution and patch configuration has been used on class level and landscape. The aim of this study is considering the landscape structure and interpretation of region existing condition. Therefore, firstly, land cover maps have been provided and subdivided. Then, 16 metrics from landscape composition and configuration metrics has been selected and analyzed based on previous experiences and studies. Results show that due to people manipulation, landscape structure has been fain-grained, the number of artificial man made patches and semi natural has been increased. Above mentioned factors has been leaded to digestion of forest and dense thickets. The landscape connectivity and integration has been also reduced by increasing varied land use patches. The landscape of region has been transformed by forest patches digestion between human made coves, especially, agricultural land integration.