Coupling Soil Erosion and Sediment Delivery with Landscape Fragmentation by Edge Metric Following Source and Sink Concept
Landscape fragmentation is critical to soil erosion and sediment delivery across landscapes.Edge density indicates the landscape fragmentation,and couples landscape fragmentation with soil erosion and sediment delivery over landscapes.Land use and land cover(LUC) data is the most widely used data for landscape pattern delineation.However,the application of LUC edge metrics without involvement of the directionality of soil erosion and sediment delivery often leads to the absence of process mechanism and impracticability in the explanation of the results.In this paper,new edge metrics were highlighted with differentiation in "sink" and "source" functions of LUC types in soil erosion and sediment delivery.In addition,directionality of soil erosion and sediment delivery was considered.Test of these edge metrics at watershed level on the Loess Plateau showed an improved correlation to edge density and soil erosion,as well as to the sediment delivery.These results showed that edge density metric is more powerful in coupling landscape fragmentation with soil erosion and sediment delivery when considering the role as a source or sink of LUC types in soil erosion and sediment delivery,and spatial arrangement of source and sink LUC types.Of course,these new edge metrics have the potential to promote the reasonability and reliability in revealing evolution of soil erosion and sediment delivery caused by landscape fragmentation.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
