Driving force analysis of land use changes in the typical farming-pastoral ecotone

The study on the driving forces of land use and land cover change (LUCC) in the farming-pastoral ecotone can instruct the regional sustainable development, which is an important part of the study of inner law of regional eco-environment evolvement. This study attempts to identify how much understanding of the driving forces of land-use changes can be obtained through the logistic regression analysis. Taking the Ongniud Banner in Inner Mongolia as a representative of typical farming-pastoral ecotone, the driving forces of LUCC change was analyzed based GIS and SAS using the logistic regression model by view of spatial coherence. The results showed that the explanatory variables of the spatial model of cultivated land suggest a model, where conversion to cultivated land is controlled by the rural settlement and agro-climatic potential. Expansion of grass is controlled by the distance to the nearest rural settlement, organic matter in the soil and distance to the nearest river. Expansion of forest is also controlled by the rural settlement and altitude. Spatial heterogeneity as well as the variability in time of land-use change processes affects our ability to use regression models for wide ranging extrapolations. These spatial models can identify the main driver forces of different land-use change through the validation of the logistic regression model of the grass expansion.