Changes in Wetland Landscape Patterns: a Review
湿地景观格局变化研究进展

wetlands are ecological landscapes with abundant biodiversity and serve as one of living environments of human beings, playing important ecological functions in regulating floods, purifying water quality and modulating climate, which have significant effects on climate change, economic development at the local, regional or global levels. Wetlands have been compartmentalized one type of land covers in global change conference. Land use structures and processes of wetland landscape have also been one of key research fields of landscape ecology and wetland ecology, since land use researches are important contents of landscape ecology. Generally, wetland landscape means wetland cells with spatial heterogeneity at the different scales. And wetland landscape patterns mean spatial arrangement of wetland landscape patches with different sizes and shapes, and have higher spatial heterogeneity, which are caused by comprehensions of all ecological processes at the different levels and have great impacts on ecological functions and processes of landscapes. Therefore, spatial structure of wetland landscapes has become one of core contents. Changes in wetland landscape patterns are closely linked to climate changes, land use/land cover changes and biodiversity at the regional or global scales. Wetland ecosystems have been proved to be one of ecosystems which are seriously endangered, and most wetlands have been transformed or lost because of natural processes and human activities. In this paper, dynamic changes in wetland landscape patterns, research methods, wetland landscape pattern indexes, driving factors and model simulating of wetland landscape changes, and relationships between changes in wetland landscape patterns and climate changes are reviewed, and key research fields in the future such as changes of wetland landscape patterns and their ecological effects, and relationships between changes of alpine wetland landscape patterns and climate changes are finally pointed out.