Spatial Explicit Evaluation of Land Use Sustainability Based on Grid analysis—A Case Study of the Bohai Rim

Abstract

Identifying the land use sustainability at an explicit spatial level in large areas is critical for optimizing the land use. The evaluation of sustainable land use generally takes the administrative units at the provincial, prefecture, or county level as the spatial scale, which ignore the spatial variation within the administrative units. This paper aims to put forward a novel evaluation method on sustainable land use evaluation and evaluate the land use sustainability at a grid level of 5 km in Bohai Rim of China. This paper first established an index system of sustainable land use evaluation frame with 13 indicators in four criterion levels: ecology, economy, society, and spatial pattern. Then, the 13 indicators were expressed at 5 km grids level. At last, the land use sustainability was evaluated of each grids based on the spatial principal component analysis. The results showed that the ecological environment in the Bohai Rim has the greatest impact on the level of sustainable land use. The high level of sustainable land use is generally distributed in the northwest and northeast in Bohai Rim, and the low level of sustainability is concentrated in the southwest of the Bohai Rim. This paper proposed a novel method to evaluate of the land use sustainability at a spatial explicit level. The method could offer more spatial information of sustainable land use to help government propose more efficient policies regarding improving land use sustainability.