Appraisal of landscape health based on landscape structure in Chengdu-Chongqing economic belt, China

Landscape is an appropriate scale to research the socio-economic activities of human impact on ecological environment. Introducing the concept of health into landscape assessment may not only carry on effective and quantitative monitoring of the spatio-temporal influence of eco-environment, but also provide a workable foundation for the systemically research on the “social - economic - ecological” health and integrality. Under the global economization´s background, the Chengdu-Chongqing economical belt had some urban and rural eco-environmental problems accompanied by the gradual deepening of urbanization. On the foundation of summarizing the landscape health´s concept, this article chose some landscape indices to construct a index system for landscape health evaluation on the landscape level based on landscape structure, and appraised the landscape health of Chengdu-Chongqing economical belt in 2000 and 2005 using a combination of mathematical methods. The analysis demonstrated that the landscape health index in the study area was a certain extent declined in the time interval. The results showed that the method of landscape health evaluation based on landscape structure could achieve an available quantitative analysis of the regional landscape and its dynamic changes.