PROGRESS IN GEOGRAPHY ›› 2008, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (6): 1-11.doi: 10.11820/dlkxjz.2008.06.001

• Original Articles •     Next Articles

Chinese Literature Analysis on Land Use Research in China

ZHANG Yili1, NIE Yong1,2, LV Xiaofang1,3   

  1. 1. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China;
    2. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China;
    3. College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
  • Received:2008-06-01 Revised:2008-10-01 Online:2008-11-25 Published:2008-11-25

Abstract:

Many ecological and environmental problems in China and the difficulties emerging in the progress of sustainable development are always related to land use and its change. So it is necessary to find ways to solve such problems that determine the necessity and importance of the comprehensive researches on land use. The research literature on land use reflects the level, current situation and trend of the researches, which have important scientific value and strategic significance in showing the land use researches in China, providing scientific basis for policy formulation of regional sustainable development and identifying hotspot region and problem in the land use researches. This paper further analyzed the aspects of quantity, study area, method, topics and changes of Chinese literature on land use in China in the latest 30 years by the method of bibliometrics, and explored the current situation and trend of researches on land use based on 4531 relevant papers covering the period 1978-2007 that were gained through incomplete searches for and analysis on the literatures in recent 100 years. The literature analysis showed that: (1) The numbers of Chinese literature on land use in the latest 30 years steadily increased from 2 articles in 1978 to 796 in 2007, and the quality of the papers improved gradually, especially, both kept a trend of rapid development in the past 10 years. (2) The percentage of papers on case researches of the special study area was low (only 16.8%), however, the number of theoretical papers and reviews took up quite a few. (3) The number of papers on LUCC and their driving forces were the most (33.6%), and papers on land use classification and partitioning were fewer (7.15%) in the distribution of research topic. (4) In view of the study area, the researches are mainly distributed in eastern China, but the trend of the new research was focused on western China, especially environmental sensitive area, such as arid farming-pastoral zone, rural-urban fringe recently. The researches which took the geographical unit or watershed as the case study area were more than that taking the administrative division as the case study area. (5) On technical aspect, 3S technique, experiment and modeling were used to the land use research, which increased the scientificity and technicality of the research and changed the features of the way of using data, that is to integrate the multisource remote sensing data with field investigation, thematic data and statistical data. The main trend and direction of theory and method on land use research included the urgent further and integrated study of land use theory at a coupled human-environment system, the strengthening and deepening of case study in typical geographical units, the deepening and integrating of the methods used in mechanism study, the multi-scale construction of land use coupled system, the unification of data standardization and establishing the share platform of data, enhancing the quantitative research on the evaluation indexes and model of land use and regional sustainable development.

Key words: China, land use, land use and land cover change, literature analysis, research progress