Evaluation of urban forest landscape health: a case study of the Nanguo Peach Garden, China

doi:10.3832/ifor3206-013

Evaluation of urban forest landscape health: a case study of the Nanguo Peach Garden, China

Qing Zhao⁽¹⁾ , Hong-Hui Tang⁽¹⁾, Chang-Jun Gao⁽¹⁾, Yu-Han Wei⁽²⁾

iForest - Biogeosciences and Forestry, Volume 13, Issue 3, Pages 175-184 (2020)
doi: https://doi.org/10.3832/ifor3206-013
Published: May 02, 2020 - Copyright © 2020 SISEF

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Urban forests are important as they provide recreation areas and offer ecological services. Both functions determine the status of an urban forest and reflect contradictory aspects of forest tourism development and environment conservation. However, assessment of urban forest health status at a landscape scale remains scarce. Here, we selected the Nanguo Peach Garden, China, as the study area. Urban forest health status at the landscape scale were classified into recreation and eco-conservation services. Sustainability was quantified using the principal component analysis and the Kriging method to map the landscape classification in the study area. With regard to landscape recreation sustainability, some 18.9% of the total study region was classified as “very good”. They were mainly distributed in the north, southwest, and southeast parts of the study area. The central and southeast regions, accounting for 9.5% of the total area, were classified as “very good” for eco-conservation sustainability. Regarding landscape health, the region classified as “very good” accounted for 11.1% of the total study area, and it was mainly distributed in the southern part of the area; the region classified as “very poor” accounted for 16.4% of the total area, and it was located in the northwestern and eastern parts of the study area. With improved landscape health status, the forest/non-forest patch area ratio was increased and the patch number ratio was decreased. A landscape was considered the healthiest when the forest/ non-forest area ratio was 0.65 and the patch number was 0.48. The spatial distribution of landscape recreation sustainability and eco-conservation sustainability differed in the Nanguo Peach Garden, and a close relationship was observed between the landscape health and forest landscape internal structure. Forest/non-forest patch area ratios and patch number ratios were relatively stable and constant, suggesting the urban forest landscapes were healthy. The healthiest forest landscapes were mainly distributed in the forest/non-forest transition zone and the unhealthiest forest landscape was mainly located in a single natural forest.

Keywords

Eco-conservation Sustainability, Landscape Recreation Sustainability, Patch Area Ratio, Patch Number Ratio, Urban Forest Landscape

Authors’ address

(1)

Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Silviculture Protection and Utilization, Guangdong Academy of Forestry, Guangzhou 510520 (P. R. China)

(2)

Lingnan Comprehensive Surveying and Designing Institute of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou 510663 (P. R. China)

Corresponding author

Qing Zhao
22306040@qq.com

Citation

Zhao Q, Tang H-H, Gao C-J, Wei Y-H (2020). Evaluation of urban forest landscape health: a case study of the Nanguo Peach Garden, China. iForest 13: 175-184. - doi: 10.3832/ifor3206-013

Academic Editor

Raffaele Lafortezza

Paper history

Received: Jul 31, 2019
Accepted: Feb 13, 2020

First online: May 02, 2020
Publication Date: Jun 30, 2020
Publication Time: 2.63 months

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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