Landform classification based on landform geospatial structure – a case study on Loess Plateau of China

Landform classification, which is a key topic of geography, is of great significance to a wide range of fields including human construction, geological structure research, environmental governance, etc. Previous studies of landform classification generally paid attention to the topographic or texture information, whilst the watershed spatial structure has not been used. This study developed a new landform classification method based on watershed geospatial structure. Via abstracting the landform into the internal and marginal structure, we adopted the gully weighted complex network (GWCN) and watershed boundary profile (WBP) to simulate the watershed geospatial structure. Introducing various indices to quantitatively depict the watershed geospatial structure, we conducted the landform classification on the Northern Shaanxi of Loess Plateau with a watershed-based strategy and established the classification map. The classified landform distribution has significant spatial aggregation and clear regional boundaries. Classification accuracy reached 89% and the kappa coefficient reached 0.87%. Besides, the proposed method has a positive response to some similar and complex landforms. In general, the present study first utilized the watershed geospatial structure to conduct landform classification and is an efficient landform classification method with well accuracy and universality, offering additional insights for landform classification and mapping.