Driving Force Analysis Of Land Use Change In Kashi Area

With the development of urbanization, modern industrialization and industrial aggregation, population explosion and the demand for improvement of living condition, human’s demands for nature resources grow rapidly, especially for the land resources. It has become an important issue in the field of land sciences to utilize the limited land resources rationally, improve the utilization rate and productivity of land resources, and achieve the sustainable utilization of land resources.Taking Kashi of Xinjiang as the study area, based on land use change data of Kashi in 2009 and 2013, the paper analyses the changes and spatial differences of land use pattern and the land use degree. Grey correlation analysis was applied to analyze the main influence factors and driving mechanism of land use transfer by connecting the land use data and social economic statistical data. Conclusions of the study are as follows:(1) In the view of the current land use situation of Kashi, according to the data of 2013, Kashi area had been exploited 207677.05 hectares, which taked account of about 18.64% of the total land area, while the rest of the land area was 7454040.68 hectares and 66.91% of the total land area, the land utilization rate was relatively low, which was related to the harsh natural environment and the adverse weather conditions.(2) In the view of the changes of land use, the most significant change was that the urban and industrial land use changes in the rate of 16.41%, followed by transport is the rate of 9.08%. It was concerned with the western development, the increased infrastructure investment from central government to the border provinces, which was mainly reflected in the substantial increase in investment in fixed assets. Investment in fixed assets mainly tilted to the transportation, water, energy and other infrastructure industry, had greatly improved the investment environment in Kashi, and the convenient degree to foreign, further optimization of the industrial structure.(3) In the view of changing rate of land utilization, the urban and industrial land use increased the most significantly, whose annual changing rate was up to 3.28%; secondly, the amount of transportation land use changed by 1.82% annually; the changing rate of other land use such as grassland was 0.04% because of its too large base amount. Totally, the average changing rate of land use in Kashgar was very high, up to 5.27% annually.(4) Based on observing changes of land use, according to the qualitative and quantitative analysis of driving factors selected from natural environment and social economy, it’s concluded that natural environment has much effect on the development of land use, but the affection was little in short term. Relatively speaking, cultural factors were significantly influential; population change, economy, industrialization and policy had varying degrees influence on the changes of land utilization.