Abstract
Land use and land cover change have received considerable attention from global researchers in recent decades. The conflicts between different development strategies for land uses have become a problem that urgently needs to be solved, especially in those regions with a fragile ecological environment. The development of scenario simulations is essential in order to highlight possible alternative pathways for the future under the backgrounds of urbanization, economic growth and ecological protection. This study simulated land use changes for Tekes in 2020 with the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects at Small regional extent (CLUE-S) model under a ‘business as usual’ scenario, cropland protection scenario, ecological security scenario, and artificial modification scenario. The results indicated that the spatial patterns of the land use types were explained well by the environment variables, and the selected models had a satisfactory accuracy in this study. The requirements and the patterns were quite different owing to the variation of the major objectives of the four scenarios. In addition to the constraint rules of the land use transformation, the hot point for land use change was its spatial coherency. Areas near to an existing land use type were more likely to transform to that type than those farther away. The increased cropland and urban land were mainly located around the current cropland and urban land while forests and grassland were more likely to occur in places with flat terrain and good hydrological conditions. The results could contribute to better insight into the relationships between land use changes and their driving factors and provide a scientific basis for regional management strategies and sustainable land use development.
Highlights
Land use changes could bring a number of environmental and ecological problems, such as decrease in biodiversity [1], resource depletion, and the degradation of ecosystem services [2]
The results of the logistic regression indicate that the spatial pattern of all the six land use types could be explained well by the driving variables selected in this study
The demands and the patterns of the land uses varied a lot among different scenarios
Summary
Land use changes could bring a number of environmental and ecological problems, such as decrease in biodiversity [1], resource depletion, and the degradation of ecosystem services [2]. There are irreconcilable conflicts between urban development and agricultural land preservation, which are becoming increasing contentious in China [3,4]. Rapid urbanization has promoted social and economic development and benefits the people in terms of income growth and improved living conditions [8]. The conflicts under different development strategies has become a problem that urgently needs to be solved, especially in northwestern China, which has a vulnerable ecological environment. As the harmonic development of the socio-economic and ecological environment is the main theme of current society, how to solve these conflicts properly becomes an important issue
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