Multi-scaled Identification Of Landscape Character Types And Areas

Thanks to rapid industrialization,commercialization and urbanization,China’s landscape is facing the increasing issues from the fragmentation,isolation and marginalization,which requires protection and management strategies from the holistic and synergetic perspectives.Landscape characterisation,a process of identifying,classifying,mapping,describing landscape,is an effective tool for understanding landscape concepts,managing the landscape changes,and distinguishing the landscape values.It offers a basic theory and practical method for China’s landscape issues at multi-scales from a holistic perspective.This study decodes the driving forces of European landscape character research in terms of landscape concepts,stewardship objects,and research status.Based on an inductive deductive approach,firstly,we set out to ask how landscape character are formed?Namely,the generation and evolution of landscape character from a time-depth perspective.This question is articulated to establish time-space integrity for dynamic and systematic landscape character identification.Afterwards,five core issues regarding landscape character type and area identification at different scales are questioned and answered:（1）Who thinks of landscape character?Namely,participatory decision-makers analysis of landscape character;（2）What are landscape factors?Namely,constitutes an analysis of landscape character factors;（3）How to perceive landscape character?Namely,the interpretation of the perceptual model of landscape character;（4）How to identify landscape character?Namely,research on methods of identifying landscape character;（5）How to express landscape character?Namely,the graphical form of landscape character mapping.Based on the questions and answers,we analyzed the changing patterns from regional to site scales:From experts to the public as decision-makers;From natural factors to cultural factors as factors;From indirect to direct perception as cognitions;From digital parametric to manual delimitation as identification methods;From professional diagram to schematic diagram as graphical forms.At last,a formulaic language for multi-scaled landscape character identification is proposed:“Identification=f(P_（t）,F_（t）,C_（t）,M_（t）,G_（t）)”.To explore the identification of landscape character under the natural and cultural contexts in China,within the nested scales,the regional scale of Poyang Lake,the local scale of Lushan,and the local scale of Lushan Kuling are selected as the objects of empirical research,which are the representative landscape typologies in terms of“water”,“mountain”and“city”.And three types of experimental design were carried out:experiments on technical method,experiments on landscape concept,and experiments with multiple participants.At the regional scale,the experiment on technical method is to compare the 16 types of landscape character which identified by K-means clustering and two-step clustering;320 areas of landscape character were identified by the automatic delineation method of the image processing software.By comparing the results of different identification methods,a“comprehensive method”for improving the accuracy and efficiency was tested.Finally,16 landscape character types and 132 landscape character areas were identified at regional scale.At the local scale,the experiment on landscape concept is adopting the“comprehensive method”to identify the 21 landscape character types and 20 areas at the horizontal interface;adopting the“Shanshui correlation method”to identify 13 landscape character types and 46 areas.The two ideas are compared in terms of method application,identification object,identification process and identification result,and it is thought that the“Shanshui correlation method”is more applicable based on the object Lushan.At the site scale the multi-participant experiment was conducted.Five landscape character types,as the baseline,was identified by the“comprehensive method”,and then the 4 landscape character types and 8 areas were identified utilizing three multi-participant mapping approaches,namely,public interviews,point of interest mapping and workshop mapping.Based on the identification of landscape character types and areas,landscape character assessment is conducted with the goal of overall landscape protection and management.According to the matrix analysis of landscape change rates and landscape character conditions,four types of landscape protection and management was classified.They are protection,enhancement,restoration,and creation.Based on the classified results,landscape management patterns were proposed,that is,the structure pattern at regional scale,the zoning pattern at local scale,the coordinate pattern at site scale.In the current context of landscape fragmentation,isolation and marginalization,systematic landscape character research will serve to integrate landscape protection and management at different scales.