Analysis of dynamics and driving factors of wetland landscape in Zoige, Eastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Zoige Wetland is one of the largest plateau wetlands in the world. This paper provides a dynamic analysis of spatial and temporal patterns of the wetland in Zoige, Eastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, supported by ERDAS8.7 and ArcGIS9.0. It is the first comparative analysis of a system of rapidly changing wetland with landscape patterns in Zoige, using 3 classified landsat Thematic Mapper images of 1977, 1994 and 2001. The classified images were used to generate wetland distributing maps, and shape index (S), diversity index (H), dominance index (D), evenness index (E), fragmentation index (F) and fractal dimension (Fd) were calculated and analyzed spatiotemporally across pure grazing area in Zoige for each landscape type and in different periods (before 1977, during 1977∼1994 and 1994∼2001), as well as the driving forces of natural and anthropogenic.