Spatial Differentiation Of Population In The Yellow River Basin

Population change reflects the change of regional internal spatial structure, and influences the structure and arrangement of regional internal economics, social, industry etc. The spatial redistribution and configuration of population are important aspects of analyzing regional internal space reconstruction. Yellow River basin is an important basin in China, from the spatial and temporal angle to study the population spatial difference, and reveal the influencing factors and mechanism of population spatial difference, they can guide reasonable population distribution and flow, optimize the population spatial structure of Yellow River basin, coordinate the relation between population and economic society, resource, environment, and provide scientific basis.The research on the Yellow River basin used to focused on economic development by the exploitation of resources. This dissertation studied the Yellow River basin on the aspect of spatial difference of river basin population. This study focused on the status of spatial difference and its change, and the main factors affecting the spatial difference were analyzed. The conclusions are as follows:There was imbalanced distribution of population in Yellow River basin. More than 95 percent of the population is concentrated in less than 50 percent of the land. Population gravity center and geometric gravity centre have a significant offset, and the trend of deviation from geometric gravity centre is going on. There was great imbalance between population and land in the spatial distribution. The population concentration index decreased 0.01 from 1990 to 2005. Generally, the concentration abated in some degree.Along the watercourse, east better and sectionality were the characteristics of the population spatial distribution in the Yellow River basin. The pattern of population distribution in Yellow River basin is"one district-two axis"."one districe"is the lower reaches of the river, it is the core of the Yellow River basin. And"two axis": In the middle reaches of the river, population distribution along Weihe and Fenhe river valley is the densely populated south axis. And population distribution along Jingbao-Baolan is the densely populated northern axis. The upriver and the middle reaches of the river were relatively scare, so they were the periphery.The population spatial distribution took on the form of"pole-axle-circle"pattern. Integrally, the relatively developed cities in the lower reaches of the river, such as Jinan and Zhengzhou, were the core of the whole river basin, and the resource-intensive cities or regional political centers in the upper river and the middle reaches of the river, such as Lanzhou, Baotou, Taiyuan, Xi'an, were the cores of the second level. The trunk and main branches, such as Weihe River and Fenhe River, were the axletree of economic development in the Yellow River basin. Around the relatively intensiv cores, there are circle-structure regions under the effect of convergency and diffusion. There were grades in the population intension level from the lower reaches of the river to the upper river.There was great spatial relativity and coupling between the population spatial difference and natural condition, economic development ,traffic location, mutual effects among regions . Natural condition was the basis of the population spatial difference. With the pass of time, natural condition still has significant impaction on population distribution. The difference of economic development was the cause factor for population distribution. Traffic location is an important symbol of spatial accessibility, and it strengthened the characteristics of along the watercourse and sectionality. Spatial mutual effects represent the region space is at or near the club of high level or low level. Interaction of all these factors intensifies the difference of population distribution, and in space this expresses section of population distribution and core-periphery.