[Landscape pattern changes at village scale using high resolution satellite images: A case study in low-slope hilly area of Dali City, Northwestern Yunnan Province].

Human activity is the main driving force of the change of land cover and landscape patterns. However, there are few studies focusing on the mechanism of human-induced change of land cover and landscape patterns at village scale. In this study, taking low-slope hilly area of Dali City, Northwestern Yunnan Province as a case study area, high resolution satellite images were introduced to find out the rules of land cover and landscape pattern changes, i.e. GeoEye-1 of 2009 and World- View-3 of 2014. The object-oriented and human-computer-interaction approaches were applied to interpret the images using ArcGIS 10.2 and ENVI 5.2. The results showed that, the main land cover types in the study area were forest land, paddy field and dry land in 2009, with forest, bulldozed unbuilt ground and paddy field in 2014, accounting for 82.8% and 70.9% of the total area, respectively. The land cover transition showed that, during 2009-2014, the main land cover change flows were from forest land, paddy field and dry land, to bulldozed unbuilt ground and construction land. Furthermore, the area of bulldozed but unbuilt land had increased to be 531.57 hm² in 2014, which mainly came from forest land (42.8%), dry land (21.7%), and paddy field (14.2%). Landscape pattern change was characterized as the increase of patch quantity and density, the decrease of mean patch size, the complication of patch shape, the fragmentation of landscape patches, and the diversification of landscape patterns.