Stability analysis unit and spatial distribution pattern of the terrain texture in the northern Shaanxi Loess Plateau

Terrain texture analysis is an important method of digital terrain analysis in quantitative geomorphological research and in the exploration of the spatial heterogeneity and autocorrelation of terrain features. However, a major issue often neglected in previous studies is the calculation unit of the terrain texture, that is, the stability analysis unit. As the test size increases, the derived terrain textures become increasingly similar so that their differences can be ignored. The test size of terrain texture is defined as the stability analysis unit. This study randomly selected 48 areas within the Loess Plateau in northern Shaanxi in China as the study sites and used the gray level co-occurrence matrix to calculate the terrain texture. The stability analysis unit of the terrain texture was then extracted, and its spatial distribution pattern in the Loess Plateau was studiedusing spatial interpolation method. Four terrain texture metrics, i.e., homogeneity, energy, correlation, and contrast, were extracted on the basis of the stability analysis unit, and the spatial variation patterns of these parameters were studied. Results showed that the spatial distribution pattern and the terrain texture metrics reflected a trend of high–low–high from north to south, which correlated with the spatial distribution of the landforms at the Loess Plateau. In addition, the terrain texture measures was significantly correlated with the terrain factors of gully density and slope, and this relationship showed that terrain texture measures based on the stability analysis unit could reflect the basic characteristics of terrain morphology. The stability analysis unit provided a reasonable analytical scale for terrain texture analysis and could be used as a measure of the regional topography to accurately describe basic terrain characteristics.

Spatial Structure Characteristics Detecting of Landform based on Improved 3D Lacunarity Model

The spatial structure characteristics of landform are the foundation of geomorphologic classification and recognition.This paper proposed a new method on quantifying spatial structure characteristics of terrain surface based on improved 3D Lacunarity model.Lacunarity curve and its numerical integration are used in this model to improve traditional classification result that different morphological types may share the close value of indexes based on global statistical analysis.Experiments at four test areas with different landform types show that improved 3D Lacunarity model can effectively distinguish different morphological types per texture analysis.Higher sensitivity in distinguishing the tiny differences of texture characteristics of terrain surface shows that the quantification method by 3D Lacu-narity model and its numerical integration presented in this paper could contribute to improving the accuracy of land-form classifications and relative studies.