Abstract
Against the background of the Rural Vitalization Strategy in the gully regions of the Loess Plateau, large number of residents living in gullies move to tableland. On the one hand, this causes the disappearance of slope villages and gully villages; on the other hand, it increases ecological pressure on tableland, which was originally densely populated. The villages’ locations, the developing conditions, and the ecological carrying capacity of the surrounding villages have influence on the development direction of these villages and regional system planning. Through comparative analysis of different analysis methods for determining ecological carrying capacity, this paper takes the limiting factor analysis method as the main method and improves it according to the local conditions. Through the analysis of maximum ecological carrying capacity, current carrying capacity, and current population, we can determine which villages have the potential to support more immigrants and which ones should be integrated with others to improve the human settlement environment. At the same time, villages are graded so that the present and future human settlements’ environment can be further analyzed and predicted, which can be also adopted as an important guide for the local villages’ relocation and combination. Finally, we select a representative region to prove the general applicability of our planning method in the Loess Plateau.
Highlights
According to the requirement for per-capita food, the following Table 4 can be used as a reference to show the per capita cultivable land requirement for the different food demand levels
Previous studies extracting ecological carrying capacity have commonly been based on ecological footprint, measurement of natural vegetation as first productivity, supply–demand balance, the state-space method and the model forecast method, which includes the limiting factor method
Among the three main limiting factors’ analysis, the analysis results for cultivable land and water resources are much more accurate based on the relative accurate data
Summary
Regions of the Loess Plateau mainly refer to Wei Bei Loess Plateau, Shan Bei Loess Plateau, and Long Dong Loess Plateau, including seven cities, 18 counties, a population of approximately 4.3 million, and a total area of about 14.8 thousand square kilometers [1], as shown in Figure 1 and Table 1. With the process of China’s rural revitalization, improving the rural settlement environment has been on the agenda. Human settlements in the Loess Plateau have entered a drastic transformation period. Sustainability 2020, 12, 3317 Sustainability 2020, 12, 3317 2 of 23 2 of 25. SSppaaccee ddiissttrriibbuuttiioonn iinn gguullllyy rreeggiioonnss ooff tthhee LLooeessss PPllaatteeaauu
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