THE DYNAMICS OF URBAN LANDSCAPE PATTERN AND ITS ECOLOGICAL IMPACT ON PLANNING

Abstract

As urbanizing has taken place all over the world, urban has become the main habitation for most people. Therefore, the urban landscape and its impacts on the ecosystem are vital to the quality of urban living and sustainable development of human being. Based on the contemporary relevant literatures, this paper summarizes the characteristics of landscape dynamics in urban through the landscape ecology perspective, and comes out with an interesting conclusion that the track of landscape fragmentation dynamics has the alike characteristics with the Kuznets curve. It can be recognized that the changing process of landscape fragmentation goes through three stages according to the degree of urbanization development: increasing fast during the early period of urbanization, turning gently as the urban growing further, and tending to decrease when the urbanization steps to a mature phase. The authors investigate the reasons of this scene and make a brief comparison with the environmental Kuznets curve to reveal the essential differences between the two kinds of problems of spatial and non-spatial. In the latter part of the paper, the authors take a further step to discuss the impacts of changing landscape pattern on microclimate, hydrology and biodiversity etc. Before come to the end with the propose of paying more attention to the urban landscape pattern transformation and its ecological and environmental impacts in seeking sustainable development.