Transformation of land use and landscape pattern in global mountains: based on local and regional knowledge.

The combined effects of natural, anthropogenic, and socioeconomic factors have resulted in significant transformations of land use and landscape pattern in global mountains over the past two centuries, but related studies typically focus on local and regional scales, and analyses on global scale are lacking. Therefore, this study conducts a systematic review of land use and landscape patterns evolution in mountains by selecting relevant case studies to investigate the characteristics and trends at the global scale. The results show that (1) land use change in mountains is different from the global general trend, and there is a bidirectional variation relationship between forest land and agricultural land in global mountains. (2) Land use in mountains roughly experiences the natural period, agricultural expansion period, transition period, and polarization period. The corresponding landscape pattern evolution is reflected in natural mountain landscape, traditional mountain landscape, transitional mountain landscape and modern mountain landscape. (3) Due to disparities in socioeconomic development, different mountain regions are in different stages of land use and landscape pattern evolution at the same time. (4) There are two opposite trends in recent decades of land use and landscape pattern transformation in global mountains. On the positive trend, land use is polarized, and the landscape pattern has distinct heterogeneity in vertical space. On the reverse trend, the mountain landscape pattern is represented by the traditional mountain landscape of the agricultural expansion period. Overall, the results reveal the uniqueness of land use and landscape pattern transformation in global mountains, which has enlightenment for the global sustainable land use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]