Diversity of tropical forest landscape-type in Hainan Island, China
海南岛热带森林景观类型多样性

Hainan Island is the biggest tropical island in China. It is a global ecological critical region and biological hotspot for its particular location, excellent climate, complicated habitat and ecosystem vulnerability. Tropical forest landscape was the only matrix in Hainan Island before. Recently, it has changed into a mosaic of several matrixes, patches, and corridors resulted from interrelated and different land types, vegetation types, land use modes and others. This evolve was obviously a process of human activities. However, tropical forest, still, is an important type of landscape diversity in Hainan Island. Researches on landscape diversity in Hainan Island were scare, and there was no uniform classification system on the development of landscape classification. A new classification system was proposed based on landscape ecological theory and the difference of climate, topography, soil, vegetation and land use mode. Five basic units (zone, tract, province, region and type) and two assistant units (sub and group) were used in this system. The tropical forest landscape in Hainan Island was regarded as a landscape province, belonging to global tropical forest landscape zone, Asiatic (oriental) tropical forest landscape tract and Chinese tropical forest landscape subtract. Based on the grade system of region, sub-region, type-group and type, this landscape province (Hainan Island) are divided as 6 landscape regions (east moist forest landscape, west semi-arid forest landscape, central-south mountainous forest landscape, tropical evergreen needle-leaved forest landscape, tropical bamboo landscape and tropical plantation landscape), 11 tropical forest landscape sub-regions represented by lowland valley tropical rain forest landscape, 26 tropical forest landscape type-groups represented by tropical lowland valley Dipterocarpaceae forest landscape and lots of types or subtypes represented by dominant genus and species. Landscape province was named after zonal climate and vegetation type or land use mode; landscape region was named after topography and vegetation type; landscape type-group was named after habitat and vegetation group; type was named after habitat and dominant species or community group. Landscape province was based on zonal climate and vegetation type or land use mode; landscape region was based on topography and vegetation type; landscape type-group was based on habitat and vegetation group; type was based on habitat and dominant species or community group. Generally, this classification system represents the landscape diversity of tropical forest in Hainan Island though it was a primer study. Further studies are needed in order to better understand the landscape diversity of Hainan Island.