Land consolidation of rural residential area is an important way in mitigating land conflict between supply and demand, expanding urban and agricultural development and improving production and living conditions of residents in rural areas. According to statistics, at the end of 2006, the total of China's rural residential areas was 164,000 square kilometers, close to the total area of Henan Province. With 185 square meters per capita, far more than the state standard and 4.6 times amounted rural constructions than that of city areas, it's of great significance for a comprehensive rectification, so as to improve land utilization rate in the rural areas. Suitability evaluation of land consolidation of rural residential area is in nature to establish the correlative policies and plans, which is essential for land consolidation of rural residential area.Approaching the theoretical connotation of suitability evaluation for land consolidation in rural residential area and its development trend, and fully referred to the theory, methods and mature experience both at home and abroad, this paper defines the three main direction for the integration of urban and rural settlements and also builds an analytical framework for suitability assessment of the land consolidation. Cellular automata evaluation model, based on vector niche cellular, is put forward and it also creates an evaluation information system at ARCGIS platform. In the part of empirical research, taking Lianyungang City as an example of a typical region, a research of the consolidation suitability evaluation on the distribution of land plots for the rural settlements in Lianyungang City is conducted.As one of the land evaluations, suitability evaluation for land consolidation in rural residential area refers to the appropriate process that matching mutually the requirements for land conditions according to the direction and mode of rural settlements after the land arrangement with the nature of each type of land resources. Suitability evaluation for land consolidation in rural residential area is usually classified specifically into three parts: evaluation at a certain point in time, evaluation of regional disparity and evaluation of comparability. Evaluation for land consolidation in rural residential area reflects the suitability for the land arrangement at a particular point in time. With a continuous extension of time, the evaluation results will be constantly changing. Evaluation of regional disparity comes to different evaluation scores for different land due to their spatial distributions. Evaluation of comparability, acting the basis for suitability classification, refers to comparable results between different evaluation scores for rural settlement plots according to their differences in spatial distribution.After the analysis the pattern for arrangement in the integration of urban and rural settlements, this article shows the following three developing patterns in the future: First, as some rural residents in the integration of urban and rural areas are close to the city, these settlements will be directly converted into urban lands, in which the rural population will become urban residents. Second, in some rural settlements of smaller scale or scattered layout, several villages merged into centre villages or concentrate into the existing centre villages to the way of rural reconstruction, and its original residential areas can be directly changed into agricultural land use. Third, the existing centre villages and the key villages with a relatively large size, on the basis of incorporating around scattered villages, transform into new modern rural villages by re-planningThe author believes that it is necessary to analyze the driving factors in rural settlements sites before the establishment of evaluation model, divided into internal and external factors. The external driving factors mainly reflect on the changing concept of subject in rural settlements, including the changes in the custom habits, as well as cognitive changes of peasant households, and the ever-changing laws, regulations, and policies made by local and central governments. Due to farmers' current custom habits and cognitive changes are in the transition period, the relevant measures and polices made by central government and local governments for rural settlements consolidation, such as rural rebuilding construction and the policy linking the decrease in rural constructions to the increase in urban lands are only at pilot stage at present in our country, the guidance of external driving factors derives for the current rural settlements arrangement from the past related analytical data is not strong. Since both the occurrence and the direction of changes in rural settlements depends on internal factors, the article focuses on them. While suitability assessment in rural settlements consolidation also analyzes relative suitability for the different land uses in stock rural residential areas, taking economic development trend, technological advances, changes in policy, in accordance with the regional internal factors such as natural and location conditions, outside of consider in nature. Governmental decision-making departments may consider external factors comprehensively, excluding such factors as policies and the economic security ability, to identify specific sites and the consolidation direction, according to the evaluation results.While the evaluation model of niche vector cellular automata in this article, geographic cellular automata is usually targeted at the grid map. Because the available maps are more than vector ones, cellular automata model based on vector data has a strong practical significance. Ecological niche theory, as a very important theory in ecology, refers to that each species has its own role and status in the biological communities or ecosystems. That is, one species can only live in a certain scope of environmental conditions, making use of specific resources, and even only survive and develop for a suitable period. Niche theory tells that, more of two species' (ecological cells) niche overlap, there can be more intense competition, and the result is the survival of the fittest. Current rural settlements consolidation in para-urban region in our country are divided into three models: arable lands transformed from rural settlements consolidation, urban lands from rural residential sites and centre villages from original rural settlements. In the cellular automaton model, the author introduces an important concept of ecology—niche and each cellular can be given a different niche, including eco-agriculture niche, urban development niche and site transformation niche. According to various goals for rural settlements consolidation, various niche of cellular act different roles in corresponding. Biological competition passed by survival of the fittest between cellular reflects he suitability of rural settlements consolidation. Higher niche cellular usually has a stronger suitability for consolidation. the suitability at the time of t in rural settlements consolidation is attached with the niche suitability for cellular in different models for different land-use,external constraints for cellular and influence on centre cellular from neighbors.According to this idea, this paper builds the rules related to conversions to agricultural land, urban land and rebuilding original land, as well as rules for evaluation model to provide a practical basis for decision-making, which co-ordinate the industry demand. Besides, based on the above, in light of the technical characteristics of CA model, the author through geographic information system software ArcGIS9.2 served as data processing platform and the VBA technology, designs and develops visualization software using practical data. That is the information system for suitability evaluation based on niche vector CA in rural settlements consolidation (NVCA-RRSES).From the case study of Lianyungang city, the analysis on the driving factors results shows that land-use change in rural settlements is more relatively to the factors such as the elevation of the unit in which rural settlements have membership, the distance from the city centre, the content of soil organic matter and the per capita net income of farmers and other factors, while the decrease of rural settlements land is greatly influenced by reduce of the height of the unit, of the distance from the city centre, of the distance from the road, of the content of soil organic matter and of the gross domestic product per unit land. During the process of adjusting rural residential land, the transformation to the collation of urban land and rural land led to a reduction of rural settlements. When establishing the conversion rules in CA model, we must focus on those above factors. Then, in this chapter, the author makes specific suitability assessments in the transformation to agricultural land, urban land use, in situ transformation, as well as to agricultural land coordinating the industry demand, using the established classified evaluation information systems. The demolition old blocks in rural settlements consolidation, which were determined by the working mode in carpet type in the urban projects in Lianyungang in 2007-2009, serves as the standard to collate the suitability evaluation results of the transformation to agriculture land, with the prerequisite for coordinating the industry's demand. And the test results are satisfied.Finally, the article introduces the specific applications for the evaluation results. The author holds the view that we should respect rural residents' willing and fully take the level of funding into account. Besides, we should pay much attention to problems in consolidation of the rights and a combination of the use of administrative measures, plan measures and other measures should be considered in concrete operations. |