Agricultural landscape and its elements assessment in plain areas of Beijing City

Agricultural landscapes along with shelterbelts, roads and ditches have been vital targets for land consolidation and rural engineering projects. Assessment of these factors has been useful in understanding the functions, quality and interrelations within agricultural landscapes. This study focused on the key factors of agricultural landscape. It used the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Semi-Quantitative Fuzzy Evaluation Method as well as field surveys to assess agricultural landscapes in the plain areas of three districts of Beijing - Tongzhou, Shunyi and Daxing. The results showed that: 1) The quality of agricultural landscapes in the plain areas of Beijing were medium level with no significant differences among the three districts. 2) Significant differences existed among the four agricultural landscape elements with high scores for roads and ditches, medium scores for farmlands and low scores for shelterbelts. 3) Based on correlation coefficient analysis, shelterbelts and roads were more important than ditches in terms of overall farmland quality. Field survey showed that because of lack of consideration for ecological and landscape functions of agricultural landscape in current land consolidation systems and similar rural projects, there were low plant diversity in shelterbelts and green vegetation, low openness of farmlands, over hardened roads, and water pollution in ditches. These constituted the main problems of agricultural landscape in the plain area of Beijing, which required more attention in future on rural and agricultural engineering projects.