Yunnan Huaping County Land Resources Research

Huaping County, located in the highland region of northwest Yunnan Province, is a typical agricultural county in the mountainous area where minority people inhabit. In the past, in people's exploiting the land, land resource management lacks scientific planning and effective macro-control, which results in blind exploitation of land resources. For instance, problems such as deforestation for farmland reclamation, slope reclamation, and unlawful appropriation and misuse of farmland appear one after another. These problems seriously affect the advancement of land productivity. Since land resource is scarce, it is of great significance in carrying out land resource suitability evaluation and region research.Based on the present situation and development of land resource research in and abroad and the general account on basic theories and progresses of land resource suitability evaluation, this thesis conducts researches and analysis on the seven elements constituting land resource of the county: geological condition, landform, soil, weather, hydrological condition, vegetation, and social and economical human activities, and elaborates the formation of each element and their effects on the characteristics, quality, characteristic of distribution, and use methods. With the technical platform of MapGIS information system, this thesis adopts the classification system including four grades of suitability sort, suitability rank, suitability class, suitability unit, and produces evaluation unit through image superposition. It combines the general planning of land use in Huaping County with experts' opinions, and chooses seven factors as the evaluation factors. They are gradient, altitude, soil texture, soil thickness, the organic matter, the irrigation situation, and the transportation condition. The 0-1 grading system is adopted to determine the weight value of the factors. Then the weighted averaged method is used to get the total score of each evaluated unit. Then the quantity and space distribution of the land that is suitable for farming, forest, and herd. This thesis emphasizes on the suitability evaluation research of the unused land. Then the unused land suitability evaluation map and land suitability evaluation map are obtained. In the end, the thesis adopts the fuzzy clustering method assisted by the synthetic analysis method to choose nine representative indexes for region research of land use, and obtains three distinct regions in the county. At the same time, the thesis briefly elaborates the present situation of each region and the guideline of future land resource uses.The results of my research are concluded below:(1)The unique land elements of Huaping County determines that the mountainous area is large while the basin area small, and the sloping farming area is large. The land resource is mainly used for forest and a considerable proportion is for farming.(2) The result of land suitability evaluation reveals that, the land area suitable for farming is 25,700.91 hectare, the area for forestry is 158,328.69 hectare, and the area for herding is 10,914.04 hectare. The proportion of the three is about 24:145:10. Generally speaking, the proportion of each area is in consistence with current structure of land use. In the county, the uncultivated land suitable for farming takes up 5.07% of the total area of the unused land, the unused land suitable for forestry 63.16%, the unused land suitable for herding 21.60%, and the wasteland 10.17%. This result indicates that the unused land is mainly suitable for developing forestry.(3) The county is divided into three land use regions: middle and southern river valley region, northeastern semi-mountainous region, and northwestern mountainous region. The characteristics and orientations of land use in each region vary since they are situated in different zones.(4) Four countermeasures are proposed against the existing problems in land use in the county. They are transforming the ideas of land use and development, strengthening the construction of infrastructure, adjusting the land use structure, and implementing land management.The outcome of the research in this thesis can provide scientific basis for reasonable deployment of land resource, conducting land use planning, and organizing regulation and protection of land use and development throughout the county. At the same time, this thesis provides reference for other land resource researches on geologically and geographically similar areas.