ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 2015, 4, 2045-2060; doi:10.3390/ijgi4042045 OPEN ACCESS ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information ISSN 2220-9964 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi/ Article Ecological Network Construction Based on Minimum Cumulative Resistance for the City of Nanjing, China Jihong Dong*, Wenting Dai, Guoquan Shao and Jiren Xu School of Environment and Spatial Informatics, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China; E-Mails:
[email protected] (W.D.);
[email protected] (G.S.);
[email protected] (J.X.) * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]; Tel.: +86-137-7677-1450. Academic Editors: Suzana Dragicevic and Wolfgang Kainz Received: 19 July 2015 / Accepted: 7 October 2015 / Published: 13 October 2015 Abstract: With economic growth and the improvement of the urbanization level, human activities have constantly interfered with landscape patterns, resulting in serious threats to regional ecological security. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the evolution and optimization of the landscape patterns. Based on three TM images from 1990, 2000, and 2010, and selected landscape pattern indexes, the changes in the landscape pattern of Nanjing in the past twenty years were studied based on landscape ecology theory using Remote Sensing (RS) and a Geographical Information System (GIS). The ecological network was built on the basis of extracted ecological nodes and the minimum cumulative resistance. The results show that changes in the landscape pattern of the city of Nanjing were notable. Class-level indexes indicate that the farmland landscape area decreased and the degree of patch fragmentation increased.