The Change of Land Use for Rural Residency and the Driving Forces: A Case Study in Xiantao City, Hubei Province
农村居民点用地数量变化及驱动机制研究——基于湖北仙桃市的实证

The research on land use/cover and its driving force is one of the main research subjects worldwide.The land use for rural residency is an important type of land use because of its quantity and scale,which is more than 6 times of the scale in city and town.Moreover,most of the rural settlements surround by the high quality cultivated land,so the sprawl of rural settlements is more threatening to the cultivated land than the extension of city and town.One of the outstanding problems of land use is that the scale of rural settlements has not been decreased with the urbanization.In fact,it is increasing quickly.So the study on the changes of land use rural residency and their driving forces is important for protecting cultivated land and accelerating the new rural construction and rural development theoretically and realistically.First of all,the driving forces of land use change for rural residency were explained in the paper.Natural factors and socio-economic factors,and the socio-economic factors would be paid more attention because the effects of natural factors have little influence on rural residential land within a relatively short time.Then,the Xiantao City in Hubei province was taken as an example to study the changes of land use for rural settlements and the driving forces based on the land conversion data and socio-economic statistic data from 1996 to 2004.The results showed that the quantity of rural residential land has decreased 172.59 hm~2 for the past 8 years in Xiantao City,and the land use intensity was low.Per capital land area for rural settlement was 171.76m~2,exceeding the average criterion of 21.76m~2 in China.By the factors analysis,the main driving forces of land use for rural settlements were analyzed,including the economic development and urbanization,the development of science and technology and the policy factors.The regression method was set up based on the main three driving forces of the rural residential land use changes.At the end,some valuable conclusions and recommendations were put forward based on the analysis aforementioned.