Ecological Security Patterns in Landscapes and GIS Application

Abstract Spatial patterns of landscape elements and environment assets may contribute significantly to the sustaining capacity of the environment. In an operational procedure, an accessibility surface is first developed to simulate a certain ecological process. This surface is used to identify strategic landscape infrastructure, which is made of core areas, buffer zones, inter-source linkages, radiating routes and strategic points collectively called a security pattern (SP), which is associated with a certain security level for the ecological process. An ecological SP potentially has strategic value in safeguarding the ecological processes. An SP can be used as impact and change models, constraining the maximization process of development, guiding landscape improvement and spatial negotiation of changes. The above concepts and method are illustrated with a case study, Red Stone National Park (Danxia Shan), Guangdong, China. A GIS model was designed to identify ecological SPs and their uses in landscape ecological analysis and planning. The SP approach greatly benefits from GIS technology in three aspects: simulation of ecological processes, identification of security patterns based on the simulation of the ecological processes, and spatial bartering of landscape changes based on ecological SPs.