Progress in the research on land evaluation in China during the latest ten years
近10年来中国土地评价研究的进展

Based on collections and reviews of the land evaluation papers published on Chinese journals in recent 10years the major progress in this research field is presented in this paper.During this period the research on land evaluation in China has witnessed much progress in its theory,methodology and application.Firstly,much attention has been paid to the integrated considerations of social and economic factors as well as natural elements which are used in land evaluation,and to those methods which make a close combination of qualitative approach with quantitative one.Secondly,land suitability evaluation has received more rapid development although other activities such as land capability assessment were still conducted.Thirdly,the evaluation for cultivated land including the grading and valuation was popularly carried out almost in whole country and,however,the land evaluations for forestry and livestock still are less developed research fields.In the same time,very active activities have been found in the evaluation on urban land following the rapid development of land market in urban areas in China since the early1990s,and a number of new ideas have emerged and some new method-ologies have achieved in the land evaluation for tourism resources development.Fourthly,some new fields of application of land evaluation have appeared,such as the land evaluation for land degradation control in ecologically fragile regions and for land consolidation in urban and rural areas.Besides,the land evaluation for sustainable land use,particularly the development of indicator systems used in the evaluation has become one of the enthusiastic activities in the research of land evaluation.Finally,several advanced approaches such as Artificial Neural Networks(ANN)and Genetic Algorithms have been attempted in use for land evaluation even if the conventional methods such as the Analytical Hierarchy Process(AHP)were still used.In add-ition,Geographical Information System(GIS)has been popularly used in land evaluation,espec-ially in land suitability assessment.