[Classification, application, and creation of landscape indices].

In landscape ecology, it is very important to understand and grasp the ecological principles of landscape transformation. One of the research methods in common use is to describe landscape pattern and its transformation, and then connect landscape pattern with process by means of landscape indices. Based on the previous studies on landscape indices, some researches on the landscape indices' classification, descriptive ability, relationship among indices and indices' creation were conducted in this paper. Moreover, the general principles of applying landscape indices from two different levels, namely, from single index level and from index system level, were put forward.