Shaping or being shaped? Analysis of the locality of landscapes in China’s farming-pastoral ecotone, considering the effects of land use

Due to the evolutionary process and cultural context, landscapes in different regions have relevance and heterogeneity. Hence, it is necessary to understand the landscape systematically from a macro perspective. Urbanization in China involves strong land-use policy-making, which further shapes the natural and cultural landscapes of a region. It is constructive to discern the interplay between the landscape and the related land-use policies by examining changes and variations in the regional and trans-regional landscape based on locality. China’s farming-pastoral ecotone is one such region that covers a large area of 15 provincial administrative units, representing diverse forms of land use and landscape combinations. Using a comprehensive, real-time user-generated content dataset, as well as software programs, including Matlab, ArcGIS, NVivo and Octopus Collector, 27,613 photographs were coded, translated, combined, reconstructed and analyzed via spatial and content analysis. The primary conclusions are as follows. Locality elements in the farming-pastoral ecotone include nine types of dendriform nodes containing 52 free nodes, showing that the heterogeneity of the landscape is relatively high and that locality elements are abundant. After comparing the spatial distributions of diverse landscape elements, we determined that most elements related to natural landscape are located in the southern section, which presents a mostly pure locality, while elements of cultural landscape are primarily distributed across the central and northern sections, which show a type of constructed locality. The pure-constructed locality differentiation patterns coincide with policies in the south and north, which differ in terms of elasticity and rigidity. This study’s results indicate that for better or for worse, strong policies can interfere with locality development.