A patch connectivity index and its change in relation to new wetland at the Yellow River Delta

In this paper, we introduce a patch connectivity index and analyse its changes in relation to ecotope diversity and human impact intensity. Land-use maps of the newly born wetland at the Yellow River Delta of 1984, 1991 and 1996 were produced by applying an unsupervised and a supervised classification algorithm to the corresponding three scenes of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images. A model for calculating the patch connectivity index was proposed and applied to the classified images. Our results show that patch connectivity has a negative relationship with ecotope diversity and human impact intensity. This indicates that an important measure for conserving the benign succession of the newly born wetland is to prevent it from disturbance of industrial activities in order to maintain ecotope diversity and natural patch connectivity.