Abstract:The long-term human activities could influence land use/cover change and sustainability. As the global climate changes, humans are using more land resources to develop economy and create material wealth, which causes a tremendous influence on the structure of natural resources, ecology, and environment. Interference from human activities has facilitated land utilization and land coverage change, resulting in changes in land-use intensity. Land-use intensity can indicate the degree of the interference of human activities on lands, and is an important indicator of the sustainability of land use. Taking the middle and lower reaches of Shule River Basin as study region, this paper used "land-use degree (LUD)" and "human activity intensity (HAI)" models for land-use intensity, and analyzed the spatio-temporal variation of land-use intensity in this region from a multi-perspective. The results were as follows: (1) From 1987 to 2015, the land use structure in the study region changed little. Natural land was always the main land type, followed by semi-natural land and then artificial land. (2) The LUD in the study region increased by 35.36 over the 29 years. It increased the most rapidly from 1996 to 2007, and after 2007, it still increased, but more slowly. A spatial distribution pattern of "low land-use degree in east and west regions and high land-use degree in middle region" changed to "high land-use degree in east and middle regions and low land-use degree in west region". (3) The human activity intensity of artificial lands (HAI-AL) in the study region decreased from 1987 to 1996, and then increased from 1996 to 2015. The human activity intensity of semi-artificial lands (HAL-SAL) in the study region increased over the 29 years, and more rapidly after 1996.
Evaluating the quality of rural human (RH) settlements and clarifying its spatial differentiation characteristics have the most direct guiding role for the formulation of regional construction policies and the optimization of RH settlements. In this study, the index model of environmental quality of RH settlement was established. ImPACT and trade-off analysis methods were used to quantitatively identify the spatial differentiation of RH settlement and dominant impact human factors of it in Gansu Province in 2017. Then, the driving type of RH settlement environment was identified. Results are as follows. (1) The overall environmental quality of RH settlement in Gansu Province shows a decreasing trend from “west to east.” (2) The environmental quality of RH settlement is mainly affected by eight factors, of which the effect of quantity index per capita is more significant. (3) The trade-off relationship between the environmental quality index and these eight dominant factors is mainly low–low, which indicates that the human factors are the main reason for the environmental quality of the RH settlement. (4) Based on the dominant human factors, Gansu Province is classified into four driving types, of which the proportion of comprehensive type accounts for 77.01%.
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