In the past couple of decades, large – scale greening undertakings have been implemented across the Loess Plateau, bringing about notable improvements in regional vegetation cover. Besides afforestation, there have also been remarkable alterations in the spatial structure of forests. For a more in – depth understanding of afforestation processes, characterizing the dynamics of forests’ spatial structure is essential. We set the goal to characterize the dynamics of forest spatial structure in the course of afforestation and describe the spatiotemporal distribution of forest landscape across the Loess Plateau. Landscape metrics showing the complexity of shape, patch aggregation, and fragmentation were computed, sorted, and contrasted to find the dominant spatial pattern of forest patches. An analysis of the spatiotemporal distribution of the dominant spatial pattern and its transitions was performed, with emphasis on areas where forest cover expanded from low to high. The results demonstrate that when forest cover occupies a relatively small space, landscape configuration becomes the dominant spatial pattern in a kind of random way. As forest patches get bigger, the spatial pattern rapidly heads towards an aggregated state. So, aggregation was the most common forest spatial structure across the Loess Plateau from 2001 to 2022. The widespread trend of afforestation on the Loess Plateau shows a rapid increase in forest compactness, meaning that human – led efforts have mainly aimed at expanding forest cover over pre – existing patches.
