Comprehensive evaluation and spatial partition of sustainable utilization of land in Chang-Zhu-Tan region

Abstract: Along with the sustainable development theory gradually extending to land fields, the concept of sustainable land use has already been widely accepted in the world, research on the sustainable land use also has received popular international academic attention and has become a hot spot in land science study. Sustainable land use, which is the premise and foundation of sustainable development of regional resources, the environment, the economy, and society, has been widely carried out. Shortage of lands is one of the principal obstacles to explore resource-conservation & environment-friendly development mechanisms in the Chang-Zhu-Tan region. It is important to solve the resource constraints problem of restricting economic and social development and to implement sustainable land use projects in order to comprehensively evaluate sustainable land-use level, deeply investigate the current space pattern situation, and provide a scientific basis for guiding land development and policymaking for land management. Taking the Chang-Zhu-Tan region as an example, from a resource-conservation & environment-friendly system point of view, selecting 22 indicators representing four aspects including (a) the economic benefit of land use, (b) intensive land uses, (c) the ecological environment of land use, and (d) social harmony of land use, the comprehensive scores of sustainable land use in the Chang-Zhu-Tan region were calculated by factor analysis and a comprehensive evaluation method in this paper. Combining clustering analysis, maps of comprehensive spatial partition patterns of sustainable land use were drawn by applying GIS. The specific research methods and steps are as follows: 1) On the basis of dimensionless processing to each index by a standardization method, the weights and scores of the principal component factors were calculated by using principal component analysis, and the comprehensive scores or evaluation values of sustainable land use were estimated by an index evaluation method in the Chang-Zhu-Tan region; 2) The spatial pattern of sustainable land use status was analyzed, and regional levels of sustainable land use were classified; and 3) Based on the classification of spatial partitions, clustering analysis was used to eliminate subjective effects, to explain the space heterogeneity status of sustainable land use, and to validate the rationality of front level classifications in the Chang-Zhu-Tan region. All these steps were completely calculated using SPSS 13.0. Based on the above analysis, results showed that: Most of the counties were at the beginning of sustainable development in the Chang-Zhu-Tan region; individual counties (cities) were in a sustainable utilization stage or sustainable development stage - that is to say, the sustainable land use level should be improved. At the same time, there was still an obvious, regional level of sustainable land use in the Chang-Zhu-Tan region, unbalanced regional development of sustainable land use in the spatial distribution in the Chang-Zhu-Tan region, and the study area was divided into two types of development (balanced and unbalanced development) and five comprehensive spatial partitions, which generally exhibited trends of unbalanced development patterns. On the basis of regionally specific division of the summary results, some suggestions were proposed for future layout adjustments for land development and utilization.