Research on multi-scale optimal allocation of land resources in Savan district, Laos

Abstract

The optimal allocation of land resources is a reliable guarantee for sustainable land use. As one of the least developed countries in the world with rich land resources, Laos needs scientific, reasonable and efficient use of land resources to promote the comprehensive development of economy and society. Considering that the spatial distribution of land resources is extremely uneven and the land use planning experiences are limited in Laos, a multi-scale optimal allocation method system is proposed, including the multi-scale suitability evaluation method, the multi-scale quantitative structure optimization method, and the multi-scale spatial layout optimization method. Savan District in Laos was selected as the study area. Mobile mapping technology (MMT), location-based service (LBS), remote sensing (RS), and geographic information system (GIS) methods were used in combination for data acquisition and processing under the lack of information condition. Delphi, principal component analysis (PCA), and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods were integrated to a set of process for suitability evaluation. Linear programming (LP), multi-objective optimization, and operational research (OR) methods were pooled for quantitative structure optimization. Logistic regression model, cellular automaton (CA) method, and CLUE-S model were used together for spatial layout optimization. Results indicate that the multi-scale optimization method can make good use of the advantages of controling land use orientation at macro scale and maintaining data precision at micro scale. Land resources were allocated more efficiently and reasonably by using this method. This method may provide data reference for the “Belt and Road” initiative, and shed light on relative academic issues of land use in future studies.