Classification of Landscape Types Based on Land Cover, Successional Stages and Plant Functional Groups in a Species-Rich Forest in Hainan Island, China

Large-scale identification of landscape types in species-rich forest ecosystems is a challenge to landscape designers and forest ecologists. With a systematic grid-sample-plot investigation and landscape-attributes extraction of SPOT-5 imagery in a tropical forest region in Hainan Island, China, we developed a landscape classification system of land cover, successional stages, and dominant plant functional groups in species-rich forest ecosystems. We classified the study landscape into eight land cover types, four successional stages, and six functional patch types, with accuracies at ≥ 78%. The patches dominated by the pioneer functional groups were mainly distributed in areas of early recovery stages on sunny slopes at elevations 850 m. The slope gradient had no significant influence on the patch distribution patterns in the study region. Our results show that species-rich forest...