Abstract:Based on RS, GIS and Apack software, the indices of landscape pattern, such as landscape area index, landscape diversity index and landscape fragmentation index, were chosen in order to describe the spatial pattern changes of alpine wetland landscape on the Zoige Plateau in the last four decades at the landscape level. The results showed that:(1) Spatial pattern of alpine wetland landscape mainly consists of natural wetland, of which patch number and average patch area were highly larger than those of constructed wetland landscapes. Alpine wetland landscape was characteristic of marsh wetland, which had the most patch number and the largest area, and its area accounted for more than 95% of the whole wetland landscape. (2) The alpine wetland landscape had the higher spatial heterogeneity. The largest area appeared in Zoige County, making up about 50% of the whole wetland area. Wetland ratio in this county was also the highest among the five counties. Comparably, Aba County and Luqu County had much lower wetland ratio than the other three counties. (3) The total area of alpine wetland landscape showed the tendency of “increasing after decreasing”. It decreased rapidly during the period of 1966-1986, with wetland ratio decreasing from 11.1% to 8.9%; but it began to increase after 1986, there was a rapid increase by 27026.68hm2 in wetland area and by 0.7% in wetland ratio during the period from 1986 to 1995; and it was slowly increased by 3326.94 hm2during five years from 1995 to 2000. However, compared with the wetland landscape area in 1966, there was still a large-area shrinkage by 59857.83 hm2in 2000. (4) The alpine wetland landscape showed the characteristics of concentrated distribution, with the contagion of more than 0.95; And it also had higher dominance and much lower Shannon-Weaver diversity index during the last four decades. The patch number leveled off after its decreasing, while the average patch areas went on increasing. In addition, the centroid of wetland landscape moved 1254 km towards the northwest direction firstly, then 11.33km towards the southeast direction, after that 1.1km towards the north direction.