Application of the Participatory Rural Appraisal and GIS Method to the Research of Small Scale Land Use Change
PRA和GIS在小尺度土地利用变化研究中的应用

The research of land use change touches upon different spatio-temporal scales,the researches to different spatio-temporal scales solve different problems.The study and analysis of the spatio-temporal rule of land-use change aims to select suitable scale,especially small scale.However,small scale land-use change research is limited by hard data availability,land use data are scarce,especially in loess hilly-gully region.The Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) is a method by which we can acquire the basic situations of the study area through informal interviews with local residents,which are irreplaceable for studying small scale spatio-temporal land use changes.PRA along with field measurement and GIS is applied to study the land use change in village scale,taking Shanghuang village in mountainous area of southern Ningxia as an example.The research compiled land-use spatial change maps of different period,analyzed the quantity and spatial changes of land use,and reconstructed the land use history of past 25 years with GIS.The results show that the changes of farmland and forestland are obvious,the annual ratio of change reaches 8.0% and 9.2% during the period of study.The spatial distributing changes of land use showed that the farmland was mainly converted to forestland,grassland and orchard.