Character Assessment and Management of Agricultural Landscape in the Alluvial Zone of the Pearl River Delta

: [Objective] The agricultural landscape in the alluvial plain of the Pearl River Delta is spread over the plains formed by the alluvial deposits of many rivers in the shallow bay. The highly developed river network and water system, while providing convenience for agricultural production, also place higher demands on the rational development of soil and water resources. In history, local residents mainly adopted the method of embankment construction and reclamation to compete with the rivers for fields, and the interaction between humans and water lasted for more than a thousand years, giving birth to an agricultural landscape with unique landscape characters. Agricultural practices have led to profound landscape changes, with corresponding landscape characters being the result of the interaction between natural and human factors. However, in the practice of rapid urbanization and agricultural intensification, homogenized and standardized construction is rapidly expanding, and modern urban landscape elements are superimposed on traditional agricultural landscape, making the landscape highly fragmented with their characters weakened or deviating from the original landscape characters, while resulting in a continuous loss of the diversity and continuity of the agricultural landscape. Character assessment is an important basis for the management and conservation of the agricultural landscape in the context of rapid urbanization. [Methods] This research adopts the landscape character assessment (LCA) method to categorize the characters of agricultural landscape in the alluvial zone of the Pearl River Delta, and selects geographic evolution, river basin, and land cover as character superimposition elements. To better represent the interaction between natural processes and human activities or the degree of interaction between the two in the past, and to understand the historical influence if such interaction on landscape formation and characterization, the research superimposes the process of regional geographic evolution as one of the criteria for delineating landscape character areas. Specifically, the geographical evolution of the research area is divided into five stages: the