Relationships between landscape ecology structures and residents' satisfaction with their living environment

This study explores the relationship between residents' perceptions of their living environment and landscape ecology structures. Residents' satisfaction with their living environment has been popularly used as an index of the quality of the planning and design of a community. The purpose of this survey-study is to test the theory of landscape structure of landscape ecology by relating landscape structures to the environmental quality from an ecological perspective. The Aero-photography Map (1/5000) was used to digitize the landscape structures of the testing sites into GIS systems. For each kind of land use, the indexes of the landscape structures such as patch density, patch shape, size of patches, and edge effects were defined as the independent variables. The software FRAGSTATS was used to quantify the indexes of the landscape structures. The dependent variable was defined as residents' perceptions of their living environment, including their perceptions of nature and their overall level of satisfaction with their living environment. The results show that the landscape ecology structures of woods and farmland have significant relationships with residents' perceptions. The Mean Shape Index (MSI) and the Area-Weighted MSI (AWMIS) of farmland patches have significant relationships with residents' perception of natural and living satisfaction. There was also a significant relationship between residents' perception of the natural environment and their satisfaction with their living environment. Further studies related to the land use patterns of urban and rural areas are suggested, especially in the suburban areas of Taiwan.