All types of ecosystems abruptly increase in patch number resulting from the immediate influence of the short-term scenario, and then continue to increase until reaching the mid-term scenario. The exception is grassland, where the number of patches slightly decreases with added urban developments. For the long-term scenario, managed open spaces and grasslands show a decreasing pattern, which
presumably results from the removal of a group of patches due to urban development rather than from splitting into several patches. The grassland patches outnumber other ecosystem types throughout the development schemes, whereas croplands ranked the lowest levels in each scenario, maintaining approximately 5000 patches and seldom changing during the entire course of urbanisation. The steady increase in patch number is demonstrated in desert shrubs, which are the most likely to be influenced by the future urbanisation processes. At the landscape scale, the increase of patch number is insignificant because of the offset effect among the different types of ecosystem classes.