After the 1998 flood of the Yangtze River, one of the world s most important rivers, environmental experts realized that, to control flooding, much more attention must be paid to vegetation cover on bare lands, thin forest land, and shrub-covered land in mountain areas. In 1999, an environmental monitoring project of the forests in 11 provinces of the Yangtze River basin was undertaken. This book reports on soil loss prediction and the successful practices of soil loss control in eastern China in recent years.

by the authors. This beach-head is only one of several which have recently been made in landscape ecology, striving to invade and occupy a fairly new territory on the map of science. This volume's editors and collaborators made another landing in analysis of space-time patterns of forest islands. Their contribution to the First International Conference on Landscape Ecology (3) and some related analyses (4, 5, 6, 7, 8) expressed the amount of area of a given landscape type as a function of rates of income minus rates of loss in simulation models for land use and cover change. Such models of landscape change as a Markov process complement others of ecological succession for replacement of one species by another (9, 10, 11, 12), and for competition in the growth and survival of individuals while competing for limited resources on a plot "island" in a "sea" of mixed landscape terrain (9, 13). Further analysis of the meaning of terrain and the geologic and soil boundary conditions which constrain ecosystem equations is provided by George Bowen's recent thesis (14) analyzing forest island pattern in Ohio. Percent cover of forest and a density parameter (number of islands per unit area) or else a dissection index for the glaciated and (rougher) unglaciated terrain embodied much of the pattern information that was expressed more abstractly in a factor analysis.

After the 1998 flood of the Yangtze River, one of the world's most important rivers, environmental experts realized that, to control flooding, much more attention must be paid to vegetation cover on bare lands, thin forest land, and shrub-covered land in mountain areas. In 1999, an environmental monitoring project of the forests in 11 provinces of the Yangtze River basin was undertaken. This book reports on soil loss prediction and the successful practices of soil loss control in eastern China in recent years.