APPLICATION OF THE PARTICIPATORY RURAL APPRAISAL METHOD IN THE RESEARCH OF LAND USE CHANGE AT LOCAL DIMENSION--A CASE STUDY OF YAOLEDIANZI VILLAGE IN KORQIN SAND
参与性农村评估法在小尺度区域土地利用变化研究中的应用

Though the researches of land use change deal with different spatio-temporal scales, they are increasingly turing from global dimension towards regional dimension. Being one of the important aspects in land use change research, however, local scale of land use change research is limited by hard data availabilty. Land use data and maps of long temporal series are scarce, especially in Chinese villages. The Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) is a method by which the researcheres acquire the basic situations of the research region by using informal interview with local residents. PRA along with field measure is applied to study the land use change in village scale, taking the Yaoledianzi village in Korqin Sand as an example. The research protracts a series of land use maps at different era, reconstructs the land use history of past 50 years and analyzes land use change by GIS. This method provides an effective and feasible approach for obtaining land use data of local dimension, and makes good data preparations for thorough discussion on land use mechanism.