EVALUATING THE LANDSCAPE HEALTH BY ANALYZING THE STRUCTURE OF THE VEGETATIONS

From the viewpoint of the healthy landscape, the evaluation of the landscapes is not merely from the perspective of scenic beauty.
Vegetation structure is an important indicator in measuring the “health” level of an environment.
A healthy landscape carries the features of “diversity”, which includes diversity of the vegetation structure, species, and land-use.
Many studies have depicted the diversity of the species and relied on the vegetation diversity, which is also related to land-use diversity (Javier et al., 2004). Therefore, the vegetation and land-use structure is an adequate indicator of evaluating landscape health.
Three major conclusions could be drawn from this study: (1) The more abundant hedgerow landscape exists, the more the avian diversity is; (2) The more clustered water body landscape exists, the more the avian diversity is; and (3) Partial artificial disturbance could increase an area’s landscape heterogeneity and hence diversity is higher than that of undisturbed areas.

XXVII International Horticultural Congress – IHC2006: International Symposium on Horticultural Plants in Urban and Peri-Urban Life

Wei-Ming Huang, Sheng-Jung Ou, Chun-Yen Chang

healthy landscape, vegetation structure, land-use, diversity

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.2007.762.33