Spatial Variations of Landscape Metrics in Riparian Area Vegetation of Gharesou River Reaches under the Effect of Different Land Uses, Ardabil Province

The buffer strips along the river ecosystems createa permeable zone with high hydraulic roughness that enters the surface flow into the hypothetic zone and is permitted to penetrate through its roughness. The metrics were then extracted and the text results converted to the spreadsheets. It should be noted that the landscapes metrics with high inter-correlations amounts were excluded from based on the study objective and expert judgment. Therefore, the difference between the values of different landscape metric in four land uses classes were analyzed by using the SPSS software. At first, the variance homogeneity of the landscape metrics were tested and the differences among different land use classes were explored using the Analysis of Variance test. The significant differences in the values of landscape metrics were determined using the Dunnett test. According to the results, the mean changes of the CONTAG metric in different land uses was ranged from 0.00 to 69.80. The minimum and maximum mean values of the mentioned metric were calculated in the residential and rangeland land uses, with the values of 0.00 and 69.80, respectively. The mean value of changes in the SPLIT metric ranged from 9.93 to 27.97. However, the connectivity of the riparian areas have the highest amount in orchard land use, they have been fragmented due to human interference and fermentation has been occurred in the riparian area patches. Also, the results of accumulation index (AI) showed that the riparian area patches had a high connectivity in the studied reaches with different land uses. At the patch level, the mean value of AREA_CPS metric were between 25.75 to 36.96 in the studied reaches of the Gharasso River. The value of ENN landscape metric values ranges from 25.75 (agricultural land use) to 39.96 (orchard land use). In conclusion, the results showed that in some reaches located in the upstream parts of the study area which passes through Ardebil city, the riparian area vegetation had high amount of connectivity. Therefore, preserving and restoring vegetation along the river margin can preserve and enhance the environmental values and reduces the severity of damages caused by river flooding.