Spatial correlation characteristics and mechanism of cultivated land landscape pattern and cultivated land quality in different geomorphic areas of Liaoning Province

Exploring the relationship between the landscape pattern and quality of cultivated land plays an important supporting role in the protection of cultivated land by trinity. Existing research lacks an analysis of the mechanism of cultivated land landscape pattern indexes on cultivated land quality, which restricts the development of cultivated land quality improvement from the perspective of cultivated land landscape patterns. Therefore, this study used the central plain, eastern mountainous area, and western hilly area of Liaoning Province as the research objects, and used the spatial autocorrelation analysis method to explore the correlation characteristics between the landscape pattern indexes of cultivated land and the quality of cultivated land in different geomorphic areas. The spatial error model was used to analyze the specific effects of each cultivated land landscape pattern index on the quality of cultivated land in different geomorphic areas. Research results showed that 1) the comprehensive index of cultivated land landscape pattern and the quality of cultivated land in different geomorphic areas generally showed comprehensive characteristics of ‘better’ in the central plain area and ‘worse’ in the western hilly and eastern mountain areas. 2) There was a positive correlation between the comprehensive index of cultivated land landscape pattern and the quality of cultivated land in different geomorphic areas, with the correlation coefficients of 0.45 in the eastern mountain area, 0.24 in the central plain area, and 0.17 in the western hilly area. 3) The influence mechanism of the cultivated land landscape pattern indexes on cultivated land quality differed in different geomorphic areas. Among them, the maximum patch index had a significant impact on the improvement of cultivated land quality in different geomorphic areas. The landscape shape index, the average patch size, and the aggregation index had a relatively large impact on the improvement of cultivated land quality in the central plain, eastern mountain, and western hilly areas, respectively. The research results revealed that there were different degrees of positive correlations between the cultivated land landscape pattern indexes and the quality of cultivated land in different geomorphic areas, and each cultivated land landscape pattern index had different effects on the quality of cultivated land in different geomorphic areas.