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As the largest developing country in the world, China's rural areas face many poverty-related issues. It is imperative to assess poverty dynamics in a timely and effective manner in China's rural areas. Therefore, we used the poverty gap index to investigate the poverty dynamics in China's rural areas during 2000-2014 at the national, contiguous poor areas with particular difficulties and county scales. We found that China made significant achievements in poverty alleviation during 2000-2014. At the national scale, the number of impoverished counties decreased by 1428, a reduction of 97.28%. The rural population in impoverished counties decreased by 493.94 million people or 98.76%. Poverty alleviation was closely associated with economic development, especially with industrial development. Among all 15 socioeconomic indicators, the industrial added value had the highest correlation coefficient with the poverty gap index (r =-0.458, p<0.01). Meanwhile, the inequality of income distribution in the out-of-poverty counties has been aggravated. The urban-rural income gap among the out-of-poverty counties increased by 1.67-fold, and the coefficient of variation in rural per-capita income among the out-of-poverty counties also increased by 9.09%. Thus, we argued that special attention should be paid to reducing income inequality for sustainable development in China's rural areas.

To limit urban sprawl and reduce the negative impacts of urban expansion, the United States has taken the lead in delimiting urban growth boundaries (UGBs), that is, setting boundaries around cities and limiting urban expansion within such boundaries (Daniels, 2001). This approach can effectively protect the cropland and natural habitat around cities (Wei & Ye, 2014), alleviating the contradiction between urban development and the conservation of resources and environment to realize sustainable development (Jiang, Chen, et al., 2016;Long et al., 2013;Tayyebi et al., 2011). In China, where the urban land area (ULA) is increasing rapidly, delimiting UGBs has