Spatial identification of land use functions and their tradeoffs/synergies in China: Implications for sustainable land management

Land use function (LUF) has sparked widely attention of researchers and policymakers who are focusing on sustainable development. Identifying the interrelations among multiple LUFs is of great significance for land use sustainability. A conceptual classification framework was proposed and a set of spatialization models were employed to assess, identify, quantify and visualize LUFs in spatial grid context. Upon the works aforementioned, Mechanical Equilibrium Model in physics was referenced to explore the tradeoffs/synergies among LUFs. The findings suggest that the indices of economic, social and ecological functions ranged from 0.00 to 0.99, 0.00 to 0.98 and 0.00 to 0.95, respectively and they displayed obvious heterogeneity in spatial distribution. Strong tradeoffs between socio-economic function and ecological function and synergies between economic function and social function mainly occurred in economic prosperous regions, especially in urban agglomerations, whereas areas with high ecological function and low socio-economic function are spatially agglomerated in the west part of China and the periphery of urbanized regions and farming areas. Essentially, spatial incompatibilities of land use caused by different demands are the roots of the land use conflicts. Hence, optimizing management options from the perspective of multifunctional land use based on tradeoff/synergy analysis, which can demonstrate the functional complementation and conflicts, can provide a reference for land use zoning and sustainable land management.