Land Use and Ecological Civilization: A Collection of Empirical Studies

Abstract

The goal of ecological civilization construction is to realize the harmonious coexistence of human and nature. Land is the spatial carrier of ecological civilization construction. Land use types or behaviors reflect the level of intensive use of land resources, leading to different ecological environmental effects, thereby affecting the level of regional ecological civilization construction. This issue, “Land Use and Ecological Civilization”, discusses the theory and method of land use management in the view of ecological civilization from the aspects of land use efficiency, land use change, land multi-functional trade-off, land ecosystem service and land ecological risk by selecting 14 representative papers, providing practical reference for the formation of the land use mode and behavioral system of ecological civilization. With abundant research levels, this issue covers varied research scales such as village, county and province, various landform types such as plain and hill, and typical land use areas at home and abroad such as East China, Central China, Northwest China, Yangtze River Economic Belt and Japan. Being frontier and practical, the multidisciplinary research methods in this issue include literature research method, fractal theory, qualitative comparative analysis, VAR model, and econometrics, among others. Focusing on the prominent problems in the process of land use, this issue deeply discusses the hot topics such as land ecological efficiency, spatial behavior characteristics, land use structure optimization and ecological risk assessment. This issue not only reviews the current literature on urgent land use issues such as arable land abandonment and land use risk, but also tries to conduct trade-off and synergy analysis on the varied functions of the rural landscape and ecosystem, thus providing a theoretical and empirical basis for solving land use problems from the perspective of ecological civilization. This issue reflects the realistic urgency of guiding land use with the concept of ecological civilization, and provides theoretical guidance and technical support from the aspects of methods and research framework. Finally, this issue proposes five hot topics in the field of land use research from the perspective of ecological civilization in the future, namely, ecological management of land use structure, ecological evolution mechanism of land use process, land ecological use mode, early warning and regulation of land ecological security pattern, ecological management and control of land use behavior.