Abstract:Agricultural development is arguably the most dramatic form of land transformation with profound impacts on the natural environment. Therefore, the relationship between agricultural activities and landscape patterns and its regulation are important research topics of ecology. However, to date, studies on agricultural drainage ditches, which are critical agricultural landscape components, are still weak, and few published studies have assessed the effects of drainage ditch network structure on landscape pattern, yet such information is urgently needed for the conservation of wetland ecosystems under intensive cultivation. Based on a land utilization map created from a Landsat-TM satellite image from 2004 and a map of a ditch network system in the study area, we used landscape spatial pattern analysis on a GIS platform to assess the landscape pattern. Several indices reflecting ditch network characteristics, such as ditch density and α, β, γ index were also calculated. Three sample sites with 30×30km2 were selected to compare landscape pattern and ditch network structure among them. The Canonical Correspondence Analysis（CCA）method was used to identify the correlation between ditch network structure and landscape pattern. Our results showed that ditch network structure had significant effect on landscape pattern. With the complexity of network structure increasing, an increase of patch number was paralleled with a decrease of patch area; an increase of human dominated land use types was paralleled with an increasing loss of wetlands. Indices reflecting complexity of ditch network structure, such as ditch density and circuitry had close relationships with landscape pattern, while connectivity had less effect on landscape pattern. Our results also indicated that the method of CCA analysis was a suitable method to quantitatively assess the relationship between landscape pattern and ditch network structure.