Driving Forces in Archetypical Land-Use Changes in a Mountainous Watershed in East Asia

Land

Ilkwon Kim³  Quang Bao Le¹  Soo Jin Park⁴  John Tenhunen² 

[1] Natural and Social Science Interface (NSSI), Institute for Environmental Decisions (IED), ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland; E-Mail:;Department of Plant Ecology, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth 95440, Germany; E-Mail:;Professorship of Ecological Services (PES), Faculty of Biology, Chemistry and Geosciences, BayCEER, University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth 95440, Germany; E-Mail:;Department of Geography, Seoul National University, Shilim-Dong, Kwanak-Gu, Seoul 151-742, Korea; E-Mail:

关键词: land-use change;    driving factors;    So-yang River Basin;    multinomial logistic regression;    heterogeneity;    neighborhood effect;   

DOI  :  10.3390/land3030957

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Identifying patterns and drivers of regional land use changes is crucial for supporting land management and planning. Doing so for mountain ecosystems in East Asia, such as the So-yang River Basin in South Korea, has until now been a challenge because of extreme social and ecological complexities. Applying the techniques of geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical modeling via multinomial logistic regression (MNL), we attempted to examine various hypothesized drivers of land use changes, over the period 1980 to 2000. The hypothesized drivers included variables of topography, accessibility, spatial zoning policies and neighboring land use. Before the inferential statistic analyses, we identified the optimal neighborhood extents for each land use type. The two archetypical sub-periods, i.e., 1980–1990 with agricultural expansions and 1990–2000 with reforestation, have similar causal drivers, such as topographic factors, which are related to characteristics of mountainous areas, neighborhood land use, and spatial zoning policies, of land use changes. Since the statistical models robustly capture the mutual effects of biophysical heterogeneity, neighborhood characteristics and spatial zoning regulation on long-term land use changes, they are valuable for developing coupled models of social-ecological systems to simulate land use and dependent ecosystem services, and to support sustainable land management.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.