Forest Cover Change And Its Drivers In Inner Mongolia From 2000 To 2015

Forest is the lung of the Earth and it’s important for maintaining the balance of ecology.In the new era of rapid economic development,the construction of forest ecological civilization is particularly important.Monitoring the dynamic change of forest and analyzing the driving factor of forest change can provide proposal for government and it’s meaningful for protecting de forest ecological environment.Remote sensing images are the major data source of obtaining the land use and land cover information rapidly and accurately.Inner Mongolia is an important ecological security barrier in North China.Therefore,protecting forest is the significant content of ecological civilization construction in Inner Mongolia.The study area of this paper was Inner Mongolia.Using MODIS data as the data source,the land use and land cover of Inner Mongolia in 2000,2005,2010 and 2015 were classified by multi-classifier fusion.We analyzed the spatial and temporal change of forest cover area in both Inner Mongolia and its’ allied cities during 2000-2015.Forest change was divided into forest loss and forest gain.The whereabouts of forest loss and the source of forest gain in each period were analyzed.Then,fragstats was used to calculate the related landscape indexes in class level and we analyzed the landscape pattern change of forest in Inner Mongolia.After that,we counted the forest cover rate and forest loss rate in both protected area and buffer zones to analyze the effect of nature reserve on forest protection by building buffer zones.Meanwhile,slope information was obtained through DEM data and the forest cover change in different slope area were investigated to analyze the effect of slope on forest.At last,18 factors related to population,society,economy and nature were selected to build regression models.Through the models,the influencing factors of forest cover were analyzed.The main conclusions of this study were:(1).The forest cover area in Inner Mongolia increased during 2000-2015 and the core of forest moved to southwest.Except for Alxa League,Hohhot and Hulun Buir,forest cover area in other cities raised too.Forest cover area of most of the cities increased in 2000-2010,and then decreased in 2010-2015.Forest cover rate of Hulun Buir was the highest while the forest rate of Alxa League was the lowest.The main source of forest gain and the main whereabouts of forest loss were grassland,followed by unused land and arable land.Different cities had different frequencies of the exchange between land types in different periods.(2).Nature reserves have positive effect on forest protection.As the distance from protected area increased,so did the rate of forest loss.(3).Forest in Inner Mongolia were mainly distributed in places with the slopes of 6-25 degrees and greater than 45 degrees.Forest cover area decreased in the places with the slopes of 0-5 degrees.And forest cover area increased in the places with the slopes greater than 16 degrees.(4).The change of agriculture,forestry,animal husbandry fishery and rural employees at the end of the year has the most effect on the change of forest area,followed by gross output value of animal husbandry,gross output value of agriculture,grain output,average annual precipitation and road mileage.