Geodetector-Based Livability Analysis of Potential Resettlement Locations for Villages in Coal Mining Areas on the Loess Plateau of China

Abstract

The resettlement of residents within the construction area of large projects is an important task related to people’s welfare. Livability is often used as an evaluation indicator when selecting resettlement areas. According to the results of the China Development Plan and 300 questionnaires, the human settlement factors that constitute livability include the living environment, ecological health, infrastructure, public facilities, and economic development, data on which can only be obtained from existing villages, and therefore cannot be used to directly assess the livability of potential resettlement areas. In fact, these human settlement factors are formed by the complex influences of numerous geographical factors (e.g., slope, slope orientation, accessibility, etc.), and it is scientific and reliable to use these geographical factors, which can be determined for each location, to carry out the livability assessment of potential resettlement areas. To this end, this paper takes the village resettlement project in the Dafosi coal mining area on the Loess Plateau of China as an example, calculates the livability scores of the existing villages around the coal mine using the entropy weighting method, and quantitatively analyzes the relationship between the livability scores and the selected geographic factors using a spatial correlations analysis method named Geodetector. It further uses the weighted overlayed function to superimpose the main geographic factors in order to obtain a livability grading map of the potential resettlement area. The results were successfully applied to the above resettlement project. We also verified the accuracy of this paper’s assessment method by adding 184 natural villages, and the method can be applied to other types of resettlement area livability assessment.

Spatiotemporal Dynamics of the Suitability for Ecological Livability of Green Spaces in the Central Yunnan Urban Agglomeration

“…We adopted the entropy method to solve the problem of subjectivity of weighting. This method is also applicable to multi-dimensional and multi-regional research [39].…”

“…The entropy method is an objective evaluation method that can eliminate the influence of cognitive biases, making the process of determining the weights of indicators more rational and the evaluation results more scientific compared with the subjective method [39]. Compared with other objective methods, the entropy method algorithm is simple and easy to understand and has a wide range of applications.…”

Enhancing Seismic Landslide Susceptibility Analysis for Sustainable Disaster Risk Management through Machine Learning

“…The Geographic Detector investigates and reveals the driving forces behind spatial characteristics by systematically analyzing quantitative types and incorporating the examination of physical phenomena and processes. In recent years, the GeoDetector method has been combined with various approaches as an environmental assessment model, such as integrating GeoDetector with methods like geographic weighted regression, for the analysis of the potential migratory habitability of villages in coal mining areas on the Loess Plateau [35,36]; GeoDetector combined with random forests, and Bayesian networks can effectively eliminate redundant factors and improve the accuracy of evaluation models [37]. However, whether the factors screened by GeoDetector can be applied to various machine learning models has not been researched explicitly in the literature so far.…”