Citation

Xia Y, Liu D, Liu Y, He J, Hong X. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2014; 11(9): 8839-8866.

Affiliation

Changjiang River Scientific Research Institute, Changjiang Water Resources Commission, 23 Huangpu Road, Wuhan 430010, China. hongxf1215@gmail.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, MDPI: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute)

DOI

10.3390/ijerph110908839

PMID

25170679

Abstract

Alternative land use zoning scenarios provide guidance for sustainable land use controls. This study focused on an ecologically vulnerable catchment on the Loess Plateau in China, proposed a novel land use zoning model, and generated alternative zoning solutions to satisfy the various requirements of land use stakeholders and managers. This model combined multiple zoning objectives, i.e., maximum zoning suitability, maximum planning compatibility and maximum spatial compactness, with land use constraints by using goal programming technique, and employed a modified simulated annealing algorithm to search for the optimal zoning solutions. The land use zoning knowledge was incorporated into the initialisation operator and neighbourhood selection strategy of the simulated annealing algorithm to improve its efficiency. The case study indicates that the model is both effective and robust. Five optimal zoning scenarios of the study area were helpful for satisfying the requirements of land use controls in loess hilly regions, e.g., land use intensification, agricultural protection and environmental conservation.

Language: en