Assessing rural landscape diversity for management and conservation: a case study in Lichuan, China

As an important part of maintaining the diversity of territorial landscapes, rural landscape management and conservation faces many difficulties in the strategic background of China's rural revitalization. The existing methods for evaluating landscape diversity in administrative districts cannot meet the demand of "preserving the original appearance of the countryside". This paper is dedicated to exploring a spatial framework within which landscape diversity assessment methods can be applied to rural landscape management and conservation practices. We attempt to introduce landscape character assessment (LCA) as a spatial framework linking landscape diversity evaluation and landscape conservation and then update and improve a set of county-scale LCA classification and evaluation method. At the classification stage, a whole set of " landscape sample generation—landscape sample types classification—landscape description unit classification—landscape character types and areas classification " classification process system is built by combining the clustering method and automatic division method, and the boundary of landscape character areas and key landscape characteristics are obtained. At the evaluation stage, we have combined and improved the landscape diversity evaluation method and intrinsic and structural diversity were used to measure the landscape comprehensive diversity. And a matrix heat map was constructed to grade the landscape diversity vulnerability. Based on the evaluation results, we further proposed five landscape management and conservation strategies, namely “landscape transformation”, “landscape restoration”, “landscape enhancement”, “landscape maintenance” and "active conservation". This article verified this technical framework by taking Lichuan as an example, and its final results have strong correlation with the main functional zoning map of Lichuan. This study demonstrates the practicality and operability of using LCA as a spatial framework to link ecosystem approaches and management strategies. This research alleviates the difficulties in applying the ecosystem approach for the purpose of protecting key landscape characteristics. And it provides new requirements and new ideas for sustainable development of county-scale territorial spatial planning and management.