Study On County-level Land-use Zoning

Land is the essential resource for human's existence and development, which is an important foundation to sustainable development of human society. Overall land use planning is a guarantee to carry out the foundational state policy, which is "To cherish, utilize land resources legitimately and protect arable land." To rationally zoning land-use is the important content of the compilation of overall land use planning, with the guidance of which an integrated and feasible land use and development at regional scale can be reached.In 2004, a new round of the revision for the land-use plan has been launched within the country, at a time that the scientific concept of development has proposed and intensely promoted. Workers involved in this revision following the guideline and policy "Government organizing, experts leading, department cooperating, public participating, strategize scientifically" "National Land Use Overall Planning Outline (2006-2020)"was promulgated by the State Council on October 2008, which has been implemented since then. At present, the preparation work of land-use planning has been launched in municipalities and counties, and most of the overall land-use planning outlines have been assessed. Under the circumstance, County-level land-use zoning is explored and the land-use zoning of Wushan County, Chongqing Municipality is studied in this paper.The author participated in the preparation and appraisal process of the Land Use Overall Planning Outline (2006-2020) of Wushan County in Chongqing and conducted lots of field studies, during which county-level land-use zoning and practical limitations facing the new situation are summarized and new ideas guiding empirical research on zoning are proposed in this paper. An empirical research based on Wushan County of Chongqing city was conducted. To have an in-depth understanding of the study area, basic data of physical geography, socio-economic, land use status quo and other basic information of Wushan County was collected. Combining with quantitative analysis-cluster analysis and qualitative analysis, a comprehensive land-use zoning plan and different land-use are proposed This article first described the research background, it's significance, research ideas, methods, and an overview and results of land-use zoning studies were summarized from a large number of relevant researches done by both domestic and foreign researchers. The Second and the third part of the paper introduced Chinese land-use zoning theory and methods. Part IV discusses the county-level land-use zoning research methods, developed new methodology for the county-level land-use zoning. Part V described the practical studies of comprehensive land-use zoning of Wushan County in Chongqing Municipality, with the guidance of the new methodology of land-use zoning. Quantitative analysis by SPSS software-hierarchical cluster analysis was used to establish and adjusted a land-use zoning program. Further more, GIS overlay features was applied to determine the final program, and the different land use policy was also proposed. The last section is a summary of this research.This research focused on:(1) How to make a breakthrough to the limited practical work of land-use zoning and how to determine rational thoughts on the land-use zoning of Wushan County in Chongqing. In the study of land-use zoning ideas, to the question of whether it is necessary to maintain the integrity of administrative boundaries, a new idea was suggested, thus, a comprehensive land-use zoning was determined. (2) To initiate a program. Choosing a town (or township) as the basic unit of zoning, valuing the index system with the land-use indicators and projections of socio-economic indicators,by SPSS cluster analysis, respectively choosing two different sets of standardized methods (Z-scores, range-1 tol), distance measure (Euclidean Distance and Squared Euclidean Distance s), clustering methods (Between-Groups linkage and Ward's method), eight results were generated, by comparing and analyzing them with each other, a initial zoning program was established.(3) To determine the final program. By applying the overlay analysis feature of GIS to analyze the initial program and the overall land-use planning of Wushan County (2006-2009), as well as buffer analysis to the travel route drawings of Wushan County and then applying overlay to the program, the final zoning program was then established.In summary, the county-level land-use zoning was explored and studied in this research. By an thorough study of the traditional comprehensive land-use zoning method and practical application, this research suggested several ways to break the traditional limitations, and tries to provide for future studies and practical work in this field.