With the deepening of global change researches, scientists have gradually realized that land use change caused by human dimensions is one of the essential factors and important components of global environmental change. Land use is in turn affected by human dimensions. So it necessary to reveal the relationship between land change and human dimensions. The Chinese Government energetically responds to the relevant research agenda jointly formulated by IGBP and human field research programme of global environmental change and tries to get in line with it as well as focuses on the Chinese characteristics. After a brief review of the studies on the human dimensions of the land use changes at home and abroad, this paper makes a thorough and careful study on the human dimensions that affect the land use changes in Dalian from the angles of qualitative and quantitative analysis by applying the SPSS statistic analysis techniques (such as the factor analysis and the regression analysis) together upon the data collected from the government materials, the statistical data and the on-the-spot investigation records. The findings indicate the tremendous impact of human behavior. First, using factor analysis, we identified five main factors affecting land use change in Dalian: economic development and urbanization, industrial structure, agricultural structure, investment factor and population. Then, using linear regression, we put the ratio of land use change and the intensity of land use change into functional relations. The result reveals that some factors have the same impact on land use change in Dalian. For example, the factors including industrial structure, economic development and urbanization have more impact on urban land use than the others.

The Lingjiatan Site is located at the southwest of the Hanshan County in Chaohu City, Anhui Province, China. It is about 20 km east to the Chaohu Lake, 35 km north to the Yangtze River and 5 km south to the Taihu Mountain. The 14C dating of Lingjiatan Site is about 5600~5300 aBP, contemporary with the Hongshan culture and earlier than the Liangzhu culture, which falls into the Mid-Holocene epoch. According to field investigations and sampling as well as laboratory analysis of magnetic susceptibility, loess-on-ignition (LOI), chemical elements and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating of archaeological site profile of Lingjiatan Site, combined with the Mid-Holocene environment features recorded by the core drilling in the Chaohu Lake, the high resolution remote sensing image and archaeological cultural relics discoveries, this paper discussed the geographical environment characteristics of ancient human activities in the Lingjiatan Site of Chaohu City. The results show that the Lingjiatan ancients lived in the Holocene Optimum. The development of Lingjiatan culture was in interim phase under the climate transforming from warm and wet to cool and dry. The surface deposited in the last phase of late Pleistocene epoch (OSL dating is 11.6 ±1.0 ka BP) was living ground for the Lingjiatan ancient humans. The sedimentary discontinuous surface might be caused by strong fluvial erosion which formed under the warm and humid climatic condition in Mid-Holocene. The altitude of ancient landforms was different from now, which has some relationships with climatic hydrographic factors and neotectonic movement. Under the Mid-Holocene warm and humid climatic condition, the relief configuration distributed alternately with strip hillocks and rivers was further cut and formed in the southern part of Taihu Mountain. The site "peniusula" environment which had rivers flowing in the east, west and south sides of Changgang terrain was good for rice planting, hunting, fishing and water transportation.

In the 1978~2007 period, the urbanization level in China rose from 17.92% to 44.99, and the urbanization construction has made great progress. With more and more problems related to urbanization emerging, the importance of urbanization quality has been emphasized and many papers have been published in this field. According to the connotation of urbanization quality, the paper constructs the appraisal index system of urbanization quality, including economic development, infrastructure, employment, citizen life, social development, environment, land use quality, innovation quality, and urban-rural gap. With the method of entropy, the urbanization quality of 286 cities at prefecture level and above is analyzed. The results show there are great gaps of urbanization quality between cities, and the urbanization quality is not high as a whole. There is no corresponding relation between urbanization quality and city size, and "The bigger, the better" is not a correct expression concerned with urbanization quality. It is considered that population urbanization level cannot reflect urbanization quality, and that population urbanization is not the ultimate goal. Those cities of higher urbanization quality still have many deficiencies, which needs to be remedied. The spatial differences of urbanization quality are significant, with the urbanization quality decreasing from the eastern coastal regions to central and western regions. The cities of higher urbanization quality are distributed in the form of agglomeration, which fits well the urban agglomerations in China.

Tourism landscape ecosystem is a territorial complex which is formed by the interactions between tourists, residents and their circumjacent environments. And the pattern of ecosystem can also be seen as spatial variation of interactions between such elements. As a result of element interactions, the tourist flow structure is taken as the key point on pattern study. Traditional methods to analyze the landscape pattern cannot reflect the characteristics of tourism landscape ecosystem and the reciprocity of elements. Therefore, this study proposes a methods about the pattern of tourism landscape ecosystem, which is built on the basis of landscape ecology and tourism spatial theories and methods. This methodology includes five parts: the area of patch, the shape of patch, the pattern of patch, the structure connectivity and function connectivity of corridor. A case study in Lijiang County, located in northwest of Yunnan province, is described. The patches and corridors of Lijiang County were evaluated by employing such methods. This study showed that: (1) The method combines structure and progress study, and has been put forward for the landscape pattern study. (2) This method provides a scientific and spatial basis for management and environment protection of tourism area. (3) This method reflects more efficaciously the spatial relationship between elements of tourism landscape ecosystem, and should be applied for the sustainability assessment of tourism area.

Sample core CH1 with a length of 141 cm was drilled in the deepest part of Chaohu Lake by the Gravity Impact Core Sampler, and divided into 113 sediment samples in which a set interval is applied to pick about every 1 cm or 2 cm. We carried out the test and analysis of the core CH1 on the specific activity of ²¹⁰Pb and ¹³⁷Cs, magnetic parameters, granularities and 14 indicators of metal elements such as Cu, Zn, Al, Fe and so on. Based on the above study, the deposition rate is extrapolated with the specific activity of ²¹⁰Pb and the chronological surveying rod of the deposit is built, then the relation between the enrichment of metal elements and the characters of granularity & magnetism is analyzed. It is found that there are remarkable correlations between the contents of metal elements such as Cu, Zn, Al, Fe and so on, and the value of clay contents, magnetic susceptibility, SIRM. According to grain-size effect correction of metal element contents with the mean value of metal element contents from the 10 samples at the bottom of core CH1 instead of soil background values of metal element around Chaohu Lake area, it is found that the contents of Cu and Zn in deposit have increased with unnatural levels since the 1860s AD. Based on the extrapolative age of deposition rate, which was closely related with the industrial activity such as the high temperature combustion of fossil fuel, metal smelting and machine facture and so on, it is thought that the result is caused by human activity impacts. This situation, not only temporarily but also in metal pollution characters, coincides with the establishment of Anqing Inner Armory in 1861, the first Chinese arsenal in modern time, which mainly produced firearm, ammunition and steamship. It is indicated that the enrichment of metal elements such as Cu, Zn and so on, with unnatural levels is the sedimentary response to the origin of Chaohu Lake regional industry in modern time and the human industrial activity.

With the development of suburbanization, urban residents now have more choices in jobs and housing locations. Nowadays, scholars increasingly pay attention to the studies on citizens' commuting mode. The analysis of commuting space characteristics belongs to the study of geography. Based on questionnaire survey, this paper first makes a descriptive analysis of people's commuting variables, distances, and directions. Then it discusses the commuters of Beijing by decision tree analysis and data mining. Conclusions are obtained as follows: First, under the fixed pruning severity, people's commuting distance is related to their traveling vehicles, resident locations, jobs, youngest child's education conditions, living space, family incomes, usage of cars, and employment rate on local areas. Factors such as gender, educational level, marital status, housing property are not involved in the mode. Second, our study of the relations between the eight variables and commuting distance is different from some foreign studies. Some of these variables are decisive to long-distance commuters while others are decisive to short-distance commuters. Since the housing property has various types such as commercial housing, affordable housing, leasing of public housing and so on, the housing space does not have obvious effect on long-distance or short-distance commuters. Among all the reasons, migrating is not the main cause of shortening the commuting distance. Those who do not migrate have longer commuting distance because they work in suburban areas. The family life cycle with children in kindergartens or primary schools is not a key factor in shortening the commuting distance as the situation in western countries, because there are boarding nursery kindergartens, welfare on giving birth and nursing, which is different from China. Also, wage earners and specialists are not the key factors effecting commuting distance, because of the passive suburbanization in Beijing.

Forest nutrient cycling is a crucial parameter in the analysis of forest eco-system. The paper established a forest nutrient cycling spatial model which coupled nutrient cycling process model and remote sensing model of vegetation NPP. Compared with nutrient cycling process model, the forest nutrient cycling spatial model improved the spatial analysis function and made the parameters acquirement easier. The forest nutrient cycling spatial model also complemented the nutrient limitation expression in the vegetation NPP model, which combined the vegetation growth, nutrient cycling and soil chemical property together. The model was developed using module integration technique and coupled in Ecohydrology Assessment Tools. Applying the forest nutrient cycling spatial model, the research simulates and analyzes the NPP and the patterns of nutrient bio-cycling in the typical plant community in Guizhou province. Compared with the observed data, the simulated spatial results are credible and the forest nutrient cycling model can simulate the spatio-temporal patterns of nutrient bio-cycling processes.

This paper aims at supplying a scientific basis for uniting the normal reference value standard of forced vital capacity of Chinese middle-aged men. A research is made on the relationship between the normal reference value of 16461 examples of forced vital capacity of Chinese healthy middle-aged men and eight geographical factors in 189 areas of China. It is found that the correlation of geographical factors and the normal reference value of forced vital capacity of Chinese middle-aged men is quite significant (F=29.747, P=0.000). By the method of mathematical regression analysis, one regression equation is inferred. If geographical values are obtained in some areas, the normal reference value of forced vital capacity of Chinese middle-aged men of this area can be reckoned by using the regression equations. Furthermore, according to the similarity of the normal reference value of forced vital capacity of Chinese middle-aged men, China can be divided into eight regions.

By using SD (semantic differential) method which is invented in the psychological field, this article studies the relationship between city perception and objective index of nine cities in Taizhou, Zhejiang in order to offer some reference for humanized urban environment. The reason for choosing those cities is that they are suitable for studying by SD method and with the help of the local government, the data are quite easy to obtain. Through face to face interviews, the research provided questionnaire, as far as possible, to those who had opportunities for feeling all of the nine cities. According to final perceptual data, the overall characteristics of Taizhou are quite moderate, but the characteristics differ between different cities. They can be divided into three basic groups. The research indicated that there is a close relation between space perception and objective index of cities. Perceptions which were anticipated to relate with the specific objective index are not completely consistent with the real situation. Relatively speaking, the influence of economic index on perceptions is the biggest; the influence of the city size and location are the second biggest; and the influence of city construction level is the weakest. General economic output has a bigger influence on perception than per capita economic output. Generally speaking, objective index exerts influences on the following perceptions in descending order of degree: modernization perception, perception of city size and prosperity, perception of city ordering, psychological distance and city dimension. By further regression analysis, the research obtains objective index data under specific perceptions. Finally, this case study suggests two enlightenments: first, in order to affect perception effectively, we could strengthen the construction referred to the objective dada which affect perception most. Second, objective index data under specific perceptions could make up for the lack of consideration for people's feeling in some construction standards.

After a successful market reform featured by opening-up, urban China is facing a tremendous sociospatial restructuring in recent years. The rise of a new type of social space, i.e., ethnic enclaves has been remarkable. Taking Xiaobei of Guangzhou City as a study case, this paper examines the response of local residents and communities. Method of triangulation is mainly used, along with both quantitative analysis such as questionnaire and logistics regression and qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews, focus group and so on. As shown by the empirical study, a negative representation of African communities has been constructed in Guangzhou. Attitudes of local residents surveyed upon African enclaves do not show a consistent result of either acceptance or exclusion. Through a logistic regression, it is found that in terms of the variables of age, gender, educational attainments, the length of living time or religions, no variables can stand out to be significant. Employment, however, is important, while traders, workers or those involved in service sectors mainly put a positive attitude towards Africans, in contrast to professionals, self-employed or students. Moreover, interviews of traders in Xiaobei further disclose that interactions between local residents and Africans are an important determinant of the relations, which, however, are purely economic-based rather than cultural or social based. According to a study of local media reports and website, it is found that the local state-owned newspapers produce a negative impact upon the representation of African enclaves. Critical comments upon criminal cases of African immigrants already engender an invisible wall between local residents and African communities. Based on the sprawl of information on the net, such negative attitudes towards African immigrants soared. Therefore, this indicates a transition of Xiaobei from initiative concentration of African traders to negative segregation. The future of such African communities is under question.

In this study, with the coastal sandy land of Hainan Island as the research object, the representative and high-resolution stratigraphic sections including Mudui, and Qiziwan sections etc. in the eastern and western coasts of Hainan Island were selected to investigate the climatic and environmental variations of the coastal sandy land in recent 40 ka. Based on the accurate OSL and TL dating the chronologic sequence was reconstructed. The studies on the proxy indicators such as the composition and grain-size parameters of aeolian sand, SC/D value and susceptibility etc. show that during the interstadial of last glaciation the climate was relatively warm, the sea level fell by -8~10 m, and an advancing river delta formed in the coastal plain, which exhibited an alternatively distributed pattern with wetland and sand dunes. During the last glacial maximum the climate was dry and cold, and the sea level in the north of South China Sea dropped to -155 m, the Hainan Island linked up with the surrounding continental shelf and formed a vast continent, large area and various shapes of ancient sand dunes formed on the continental shelf, many rows of ancient sand ridges (dunes) parallelly extended over the (today's) coastal sandy land and formed a continuous deposition together with ancient sand dunes of the continental shelf. By the end of the last glacial maximum (17~15ka B.P.) the climate turned warm and humid, the sea level in the north of South China Sea rose to -131 m. During the last deglaciation the climate was in a cold-warm fluctuation state and six rapid climatic variation events occurred. In the cold period ancient sand ridges (dunes) experienced aggradational development but in the warm period ancient sand ridges (dunes) experienced fixation and soil-forming processes. Since the Holocene the climate turned warm and experienced fluctuated changes and at about 8 ka the sea level of South China Sea rapidly rose and gradually the modern oceanic environment formed. Meanwhile secondary sand dunes developed on the coastal sandy land and experienced multiple semi-fixation, fixation, dune aggradation and reactivation changes. This shows the coastal sandy lands in Hainan Island and other regions of China or even the global coastal sandy land experienced similar evolution processes.

The establishment of the university's new campus exerts important influence on the neighboring village by fueling economic growth, improving villagers' occupation structure, enhancing the economic strength of collectives, and impacting villagers' ideas and behaviors, etc. This paper tries to apply the remote sensing method to the study of commercial business in rural areas. With the help of remote sensing, the phases of economic activities can be obviously observed in near-college villages-the initial changes in system disturbance, rapid growth of commercial activities and the stage of gradual development. The spatial variation of the commercial activities in villages that occurred in different periods is shown on the remote sensing images through the GIS method: (1) The commercial activities extend axially to the inner district of village from the gate of campus living quarter, exhibiting the regularity of distance-decay effect and spatiality. (2) The commercial function of village-level system splits apart gradually, including the high-level variation of commercial operation, division of campus and social space, agglomeration of the commercial space with the same operation. (3) The economic activities assemble on the traffic nodes, spreading statutorily. (4) Commercial operation structure changes regularly with to the development of economy. (5) Shopping trip space for rural residents has the ringed structure of different hierarchies. It is the establishment of Henan University (a comprehensive university) that prompts the population aggregation all of a sudden, turning the western part of Kaifeng into a secondary business centre, which is the primary impetus of the village-level system's economic development. Based on the population growth theory in A-S model and the diversity of consumers' preference in Krugman model, the present paper illustrates the motive of commercial size development, the phenomenon of lasting selection caused by the fact that the agglomeration of population generates the business agglomeration, and the commercial spatial structure development from an unstable disorder to a new stable and orderly condition on a basic regularity as to increasing returns to scale.

Using the static opaque enclosed chamber, the seasonal dynamics and annual total amount of soil respiration in fence-enclosed and grazed Leymus chinensis steppes of Xilin River basin in Inner Mongolia, China, were compared in 2007, and its environmental driving factors were analyzed. The results showed that there was no significant difference between fenced and grazed plots in seasonal dynamics of soil respiration, but the grazed decreased the annual variation range of soil respiration. In growing season, the soil respiration rates were much lower in the grazed plot than in fence-enclosed plot, and annual soil respiration decreased by 33.95% due to the grazing, but in the non-growing season, there was little difference in soil respiration between the two sites. In a year round, soil respiration was positively correlated with the temperature, the Q10 values in fence-enclosed and grazing plots were 3.89 and 2.59, respectively, and grazing decreased the sensitivity of temperature sensitivity of soil respiration, while in the growing season, soil respiration was significantly related to soil moisture. In the fence-enclosed plot, soil respiration was affected by the soil water content at a depth of 0-10 cm, and the change of 0-10 cm soil water content accounted for 87.4% of variation of soil respiration. In the plot with grazing, soil water contents at depths of 10-20 and 20-30 cm were the main factors affecting the change of soil respiration, and the two factors could explain 74.9% of the total variation of soil respiration.

The assessment model of direct economic losses from typhoon disaster in Zhejiang Province is established in this research. The data of direct economic losses in the study region are converted into direct economic losses indexes. Using principal component analysis method, the assessment factors representing disaster inducing factor, disaster-formative environment and disaster-affected body are processed, and the principal component is abstracted as the input of the BP neural network model, thus the assessment model is established. Historical fitting results are consistent with the reality. It is found in the actual assessments of five typhoons affecting Zhejiang in 2007 and 2008 that the post-disaster assessment values of typhoons are higher than the actual situations, and the severer impacts the storms have, the narrower the gap between the assessment values and the actual situation is, which reflects the impact of the disaster prevention and alleviation efforts against typhoons of great influence. According to the forecast values of wind and precipitation when the typhoon began to exert some affect, pre-assessments are conducted and the consequence shows that the pre-assessment results with relatively accurate forecast values are in accordance with the post-disaster assessment values, while the ones with less accurate forecast values are unsatisfactory. Therefore, this model can be applied in the actual assessment of direct economic loss from typhoon damage, and the accurate forecast of wind and precipitation before the typhoons have effect is crucial to the improvement of the accuracy of pre-assessments.

Folk religion in Foshan was a prominent phenomenon in this historical period and influenced Foshan's development of urban space. The paper establishes a GIS database for the history of Foshan by extracting basic spatial data in this historical period and information about cultural landscape like temples from ancient maps and relevant literature. Based on the database, the paper analyzes the temporal and spatial changes in cultural landscape of folk religions in Foshan and the socio-cultural spatial meanings connoted by them. Results of the analysis indicate that: (1) During this period, temples as a landscape reached its peak both in number and complexity, featured by Guang-fu clans in the Pearl River Delta, and represented features of a highly developed commercial economy; (2) From the Ming Dynasty to early stage of the Republic of China, the landscape of temples was centered around Zu-miao Pu, Ming-xin Pu and their surrounding areas, displaying a south-to-north expanding tendency in spatial distribution, which showed its correspondence in Foshan's development of urban social space; (3) Cultural landscapes for folk belief in Beidi, with its core in Zu-miao Temple of Foshan (Ling-ying Temple), occupied a significant position. The interpretation of the space of Beidi's tour path uncovers the constitution of the fields of folk religions in Foshan, which, bridged by folk belief in Beidi and centering on Zu-miao Temple, finalized a center-to-four-corners spatial form and integrated the urban socio-cultural space in Foshan.

Questions regarding the evolution and mechanisms of clusters have generated heated debates. While some scholars have followed the perspective of the deepening of division of labor, others have adopted the lens of knowledge creation. In fact, these two processes are not mutually exclusive but complimentary, and they function interactively to shape the growth of industrial clusters. Drawing from perspectives of evolutionary economic geography, this paper develops a conceptual framework to integrate these two driving forces of clusters and their path dependent relationship, and uses this framework to analyze the flowers and plants industry in Yanling County. The case study shows that the key mechanisms underlying the growth of the cluster depend on a series of cumulative causation processes including the expansion of external market demands, the deepening of division of labor, the creation and diffusion of knowledge, and increasing returns. This study also finds that local governments, entrepreneurs, and channels of knowledge transfer play a pivotal role in cluster growth during the process of the deepening division of labor and knowledge creation.

This paper uses methods of GIS and RS, in particular, to interpret the remote sensing image, combined with the town level administrative division map. Thus it provides a standard method of defining the rural-urban fringe. According to this method we can define the rural-urban fringe of Wuxi in 6 periods from 1979 to 2008. Analyses show that the scope of rural-urban fringe has a positive correlation with the size of built-up urban area and the level of economic development. Referring to China's land-use classification system, the paper divides the land types in rural-urban fringe over the years. Using statistical features of GIS attributes table and the method of landscape ecology the paper researches the structure of the land-use, and the results show that the proportion of construction land rapidly increases as the scope of rural-urban fringe changes; at the same time, the proportion of plowland continues to decline. All the types of land-use tend to be fragmentated while construction land tends to integrate after 1998. This reflects that various planning endeavors take effect in control of construction land. The boundary length and the proportion of adjacent land also show that the rural-urban fringe land-use structure has changed. To sum it up, this analysis shows that the construction land has dominated the rural-urban fringe area instead of plowland.

Tourist flow is a basic question of tourism geography. Accordingly, spatial concentration of tourist flow draws great attention. But present studies have not distinguished its basic types concerning inherent mechanisms. This paper brings in the delimitation technique of Jansen-Verbeke's paper on the basis of domestic tourist flows of Chinese rural residents in 2003~2005. Accordingly, spatial concentration of tourist flow is classified into two basic types, that is, intra-provincial concentration and special-provincial concentration. The results can be obtained as follows: (1) Intra-provincial concentration is constrained by multi-dimensional elements, including provincial size, spatial accessibility, hierarchy of city, socio-economic factors, potential distribution of population, and motivation of travelling. As to the period 2003~2005, about 70% of tourist flows are concentrated intra-provincially. Practically, this examination is helpful to the formation of development strategy called "intra-provincial tourism". Although man-made delimitation contradicts the limitless behavior of travelling, it accords with the true fundamental characteristics. (2) Dissymmetrical flowing of inter-provincial tourist flow induces the formation of special-provincial concentration, characterized by the special pointing which reflects the inter-provincial spatial interaction. Inter-provincial tourist flows mostly inclined to move to neighbouring provinces, to economically-developed regions, to large regional centres in economic, historical and cultural perspectives, to coastal areas. "Polycentric and asymmetrical tourism system" has elementarily formed and takes on a stable spatial pattern. Its "centre-periphery" characters have different meanings for centre (i.e. eastern coastal areas) and periphery (i.e. central and western China). Central areas bear great weight of the large-scale inbound tourist flow while peripheral areas seek development due to regional economic disparities caused by development of tourism. (3) To analyze the evolving tendency from dialectic angle, this paper anticipates that intra-provincial concentration will slow down as special-provincial concentration with the increase of people's emissiveness, continual experiments of people's leisure plan, and the increasingly perfect full paid vacation system. Inter-provincial flowing of tourist flow will be much more frequent in the future.

Railways are playing an increasingly important role in economic, social and urban development in China. Now the government expects to stimulate consumption by increasing investment especially in infrastructure due to the influence of the world economic crisis. This macro-economic setting provides a very good opportunity for the development of railways and high-speed railways. Firstly, this paper compares various methods of network scale estimation, such as network analysis method, transport demanding method, analogy method and statistical analysis method, and finds that different methods have different demands for data, and their adaptability is also different. However, in all these methods, geographical & spatial characteristics and economic & social indicators are the basic elements which decide the final scale of railway network. Based on the above conclusion, this paper builds a methodology of analyzing railway network scale, and considers the railway network of China will be composed of three parts, i.e., basic railway network, high-speed railway network and inter-city railway transit. This paper deals with the first two networks. Based on the available data and appropriate method, an accessibility model is chosen to estimate the basic scale of China's railway network, and absolute connection intensity and dominant flow analysis are used to estimate high-speed railway network scale. Finally the whole railway network scale is combined and decided with GIS method. The result shows that China's railway network scale is estimated to be 150,000 km, twice as long as it is now, and its spatial service will be greatly advanced.

SELUTH urban growth model was used to simulate the process of future urban growth and land use changes, and to explore potential environmental impacts of urban development under different policy scenarios in Shenyang city. The SLEUTH model was calibrated with historical data (1988~2004) extracted from a time series of TM satellite images, and the future growth was projected out to 2030 assuming three different urban growth management scenarios: (1) current trends development scenario (Scenario CT), (2) urban planning and regional development scenario (Scenario PP) , and (3) eco-environmental protection management scenario (Scenario EP), Scenarios analysis showed that Shenyang City would be faced with sustaining urban expansion, and large amounts of farmland would be occupied by urban land under all policy scenarios. But, the patterns of urban landscape and regional landscape ecological risks resulting from urban growth would show significant differences under different policy scenarios. Under Scenario CT, urban growth area would add up to 277.0 km², of which 224.8 km² would result from the conversion of farmland to urban land. And urban development pattern would be relatively dispersed and complex, which could result in relatively high landscape ecological risk under no management. Under Scenario PP, urban land showed relatively low growth rate and urban development pattern would be more dispersed with higher landscape ecological risk than Scenario CT. Under Scenario EP, urban expansion would concentrate on existing urban land and show compact development pattern with relatively low regional landscape ecological risk. Simulation results from SLEUTH model gave good expression for the potential affects of different land use policies and urban planning scenarios on future urban growth and land use changes and landscape ecological risks. Simultaneously, these results pointed out the disadvantages of current management policies for urban growth in Shenyang City. In the process of implementation of current urban planning scenario and regional development policy, the government should pay more attention to optimization of urban spatial pattern and protection of farmland from urban expansion. And, it was necessary to take stringent environmental protection measures, to encourage compact urban growth, and to enhance intensive use of the existing land resources in future urban growth management of Shenyang City.

Tourism industry has been developing rapidly in China in recent years, which poses a big challenge to the balance of protecting the environment and meeting the growing demand of tourists. Therefore, it is very important to cultivate more ecotourists to promote the sustainable development of ecotourism industry in China. In this paper, three indexes which constitute the most important characteristic vectors for the identification and segmentation of ecotourists are discussed firstly. They are EI (Ecotourism Interest, that is, to what degree the tourists are interested in the ecotourism product), NEP (New Ecological Paradigm), and VIS (the amount of time for per visitor visiting relative rural natural regions). In addition, we analyze the interaction among EI, NEP and VIS according to related foreign and domestic case studies. On the basis of the previous research the model is built to illustrate how to cultivate and attract ecotourists. The model can also be summarized as "4-3-2-2". "4" represents four kinds of resistance pressures (including time, income, physical ability and environmental attitude) which prevent general tourists from developing into hard ecotourists. "3" represents three ecotourist classification indexes, which are NEP, VIS and improved EI. The former two indexes are two important breakthroughs for impacting visitor behaviors and the latter one is the final goal of ectourists cultivation. The first "2" represents two phases which will go from general tourists to hard ecotourists. One phase is from general tourists to general ecotourists; the other phase is from general ecotourists to hard ecotourists. The second "2" represents two routes that we can choose to cultivate hard ecotourists. One route is from frequent ecotourists to hard ecotourists; the other route is from occasional ecotourists to hard ecotourists. To overcome the four resistances we should take some concrete measures, such as enhancing the tourism ethnic education and leisure education to tourists, and strengthening the environmental interpretation system in tourism destinations. In addition, tourism operators and scenic spots should also develop more and more new ecotourism products which are more suitable for potential ecotourists.

The debate on the relationship between farm-size and productivity has not been suspended. In fact the relationship has been very important in debates about land tenure reform, which relates to the efficiency and justice. Before the 1980s, most studies had established the inverse relationship between farm-size and productivity. The higher yields observed in small farms are mainly ascribed to higher inputs especially labor. In the 1990s, however, the view of inverse relationship was once again revived. Some studies suggested that the inverse relationship might be a result of differences of land fertility and technology. Jilin is one of the major agricultural provinces in China, whose maize output accounts for 14% of the country's total production. The average land scale owned by the rural households of Jilin is much larger than that of other provinces. So, taking Jilin Province as a study case, on the basis of the data from Fixed Observation Rural Households System between 2004 and 2006, this paper validates the inverse relationship and analyzes the driving forces. The results are: (1) The relationship between farm-size and productivity is not simply linear, which is obviously inverse when farm-size is larger than 30 mu, but this inverse relationship has not been found among smaller households (1 hectare = 15 mu). (2) The lower yields observed in larger households are mainly ascribed to lower inputs per unit area especially fertilizer and labor. It is worth noting that the effect extent of fertilizer is larger than labor, which is different from the previous studies. (3) The relationship between shadow wage of agricultural labor and land scale of a household is positive. Along with the rising land scale of the rural household, the shadow wage of agricultural labor shows an obvious upward trend. And the shadow wage of larger households is much higher than market wage of peasant workers. As the farm-size in Jilin is below 20 mu, scale farming and land transfer should be encouraged in rural areas. Governments should play a positive role in the process of land transfer project, too. In addition, it is effective to increase the fertilizer input for the households with more farmland, since the input per unit area is lower in their farmland, which decreases food produce to some extent.

The annual and seasonal mean wind speeds of upper atmosphere in the period 1980~2006 over China are analyzed for 13 heights (850 hPa, 700 hPa, 500 hPa, 400 hPa, 300 hPa, 250 hPa, 200 hPa, 150 hPa, 100 hPa, 70 hPa, 50 hPa, 30 hPa, 20 hPa) and surface using the radio sounding data from 119 stations. The data are well distributed across the country, and they are standardized before the analysis. The result of our study presents a clear temporal and spatial pattern of mean wind speeds. The country-averaged annual and seasonal mean wind speeds usually increase with height up to 200 hPa, where they reach the maximum. Wind speeds then drop with height between 200~30 hPa, and they again increase above 30 hPa. Mean wind speeds of spring and autumn months bear more similar vertical change with annual mean wind speeds, while winter and summer see a marked contrast, with the winter mean wind speeds at various heights especially above 500 hPa being significantly larger than those of summertime. Generally speaking, mean wind speeds and the yearly range obviously increase from the surface to 200 hPa where subtropical westerly jet stream core is located. The horizontal distribution features of mean wind speeds are also generalized. The surface annual wind speeds are usually larger in western and eastern coastal regions, and smaller in central parts of China; Higher annual mean wind speeds at 500 hPa are observed in eastern China, with the maximum wind speeds spot over the Liaodong Peninsula of Northeast China, and lower wind speeds at this height go over the Tibetan Plateau; Annual mean maximum wind speeds at 200 hPa are between the Yangtze and Huaihe rivers. At the surface, seasonal mean wind speeds have a similar horizontal distribution with annual ones. At 500 hPa, however, the maximum wind speeds for different seasons are obviously distributed in different regions. The belt of maximum wind speeds in wintertime are observed in southern China, while it moves to the north and extends to the west in summertime. Maximum seasonal mean wind speeds at 200 hPa are seen in an east-west belt. The belt is located between the Yangtze and Huaihe rivers in spring months, in southern Xinjiang and western Inner Mongolia in summertime, between the Yellow and Huaihe rivers in autumn, and in southern China in wintertime, which corresponds well to the seasonal movements of subtropical westerly jet stream at the upper troposphere.

Beginning with the problems facing the Chinese geographical academia from a review paper on the issues of the progress and retrospect in geography in Chinese mainland, the paper reviews the related research results, and guides the readers to the methodological issues of human geography research. Through the retrospect of the development of human geography approaches and philosophies in the Anglophone world, the author comes to a conclusion that the research paradigm and methodology has been diversified since the 1970s. Through the period from the 1970s to the present, geography was in a state of turmoil. Although Chinese human geographers need not dance to the pipe of the Anglophone counterparts, the diversification of approaches in the Anglophone world can be used as a reference point. Just because of the realization of the limitations of positivist paradigm and reaction, structurism (including Marxism), humanism, feminism, and post-modernism (including poststructurism) appeared and exerted much effect on the research methodologies and paradigms of human geography in Anglophone world. During this course of methodological diversification, geography lost its traditional core but now has a strong periphery. China, as a giant transitional developing country, has a complex geographical pattern of human activities. This complexity is attributed not only to its long history and giant internal inequality, physically and economically, but also to the market-based social and economic reforms. The result is that the postmodern issue parallels the modern problem. This situation gives Chinese human geographers an unprecedented opportunity. The related researches by Chinese human geographers are dominated by empiricism, particularly positivism, and the attention that the researchers paid to the human aspects is not enough. So it is badly needed to diversify the research methodology and approach in order to deepen the researches. The paper discusses the necessity, and gives the countermeasures about the diversification of research approaches in human geography in Chinese Mainland, with the aim to do a little bit to the rational development of human geography in China.

Currently, Geo-data-mining and knowledge discovering, a new kernel of GIS spatial analysis study, which help to break theoretic limitation of Geo-expert system and to reveal an innovative research roadmap for new era Geo-information sciences, represent latest trend in researching GIS. Various research communities have tried to apply or revise mathematic tools as probability theory, spatial statistic, fuzzy set and rule based induction method to studies concerning specific geo-scientific problems. According to the latest decade development in this study area, data mining method has absorbed, borrowed and revised latest mathematic tools and theories rising in AI study area; and focused both on theoretic research and its application in mining rules lying in spatial dataset. Development of Geo-data-mining couples tightly with AI and application mathematics by widely crossing and deeply fusing. CBR (Case Based Reasoning), a new AI method that expands knowledge capturing channels, encapsulating problems by case, solving new problem by referencing historical similar ones, storing and re-using successful cases, has advantages such as simplicity, flexibility, scalability, high efficiency, knowledge learning and accumulation, which enable CBR to analyse and reason complex geo-problems. This paper mainly discusses Geo-CBR from a spatial data mining view and deems it as a kind of problem oriented spatial data mining method. Firstly, a detailed Geo-CBR definition and its encapsulating method are given as well as discrimination between spatial data mining and problem oriented Geo-CBR. Then, considering physical geography zonal and regional variation effect, inter-dependent and mutually condition relationships between geo-cases are examined in depth. And a quantitative data-mining method to explore intrinsic spatial relationships from geo-cases is presented based on rough set theory. In addition, due to variation of spatial feature types and their spatial relationships in geo-case representative model, 3 categories of spatial similarity calculating models are derived. Finally, a pilot study for LU is provided with purposes of landuse problems quantitative analysis and deduction and demonstration of Geo-CBR's characteristics and advantages in solving and analysis spatial related problems.

Based on daily temperature and precipitation data of 603 meteorological stations from 1971 to 2000, the spatio-temporal patterns of climatic change in China were analyzed using ArcGIS and Self-organizing Feature Map (SOFM) neural network model. The results show that the overall trend of climatic change in China from 1971 to 2000 was warming, and characterized by warmer and wetter in most areas except for the Sichuan basin, a small part of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and the northeast of the Tibetan Plateau. Similar to the annual trends, seasonal patterns of climatic change also exhibited warmer and wetter variation except for autumn. In autumn, the climatic change could be warmer and drier. Besides, it was hard to identify the areas that turned colder in autumn. No area was found to turn colder and drier in winter. The climatic change in China in recent 30 years showed there were significant interdecadal differences. The general trend of climatic change was dominated by temperature decrease from 1971 to 1980, while from 1981 to 2000, it reversed. The area that turned wetter during the period of 1981~1990 tended to be drier in the following 10 years. To compare with the results using Kriging Interpolation, we divided the meteorological stations into four types using SOFM. Based on the One-Way ANOVA test and statistical analysis of the properties, the clustering result of climatic change using SOFM was identified in four types: small warming rate with negative precipitation rate, dramatic warming rate with stable precipitation, small warming and precipitation rate, as well as dramatic warming and precipitation rate. There were two distribution areas of the first type. One included the North China Plain, the Loess Plateau and the Sichuan Basin, and the other concentrated in southern China. The second type consisted of Jilin and Liaoning provinces, the central part of Inner Mongolia, the Loess Plateau, the northeast of the Tibetan Plateau, some parts of Xinjiang and most parts of southern China. The third type was distributed in the northern part of Northeast China, the southeast of the Tibetan Plateau, most parts of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau and the north of Xinjiang. The fourth type was the most concentrated one and it had the least stations as well. It was located in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River plain and Central China.

In this paper, we use the concept of urban flow to describe the basic economic activity in a city, and use the concept of urban flow intensity to represent the quantitative index of external service capability of a city. We find that there is strong positive correlation between urban flow intensity and centrality index of Chinese central cities and the urban flow intensity can be used to describe the quantity of external service capability of a city effectively. By calculating the urban flow intensities of 286 central cities in Chinese urban system and analyzing their structures, we investigate the spatial distribution of external service capabilities of Chinese central cities and summarize its characteristics. The main findings are as follows: more than 85% of the total external service capability of Chinese central cities centers on the bigger cities with a population of more than 500,000 and more than 65% centers on the mega-cities with a population of more than 1 million; the cities with a population of more than 1 million take the tertiary industry as their main external service sectors, whereas the cities with a population ranging from 500,000 to 1 million have outstanding performance in manufacturing industry; the three great urban agglomerations in the eastern region concentrate on nearly half of the total national urban flow intensity. Shanghai, Beijing-Tianjin and Guangzhou-Shenzhen are the three major external service centers in national scale; the total external service capability of central cities in the eastern region is much higher than the central, western and northeastern regions, so the distribution of external service levels of central cities is greatly uneven among different regions of China.

On the basis of an operational two-layer model for estimating soil evaporation and vegetation transpiration, the vegetation transpiration and the soil evaporation during the rapidly growing season of winter wheat in northern China are retrieved using MODIS satellite data and field measurement data from 137 standard meteorological stations. Pixel Component Arranging and Comparing Algorithm and Layered Energy-separating Algorithm are the key components of the model. The former is used for decomposing surface temperature of mixed pixel into soil temperature and vegetation temperature and the latter is used for calculating Bowen-ratio of soil and vegetation, respectively. A surface energy balance method is used to determine the theoretical boundary lines, namely 'true wet/cool edge' and 'true dry/warm edge', in the trapezoid composed of mixed surface temperature and vegetation fractional cover. The variables required for the model mainly include near surface vapor pressure, air temperature, surface resistance, aerodynamic resistance, fractional vegetation cover, surface temperature and net radiation. Also their retrievals are described in the paper. Terrestrial surface heat fluxes measured by the Eddy Correlation system at Yucheng Agro-ecosystem Station are used to validate the estimated results. It shows that the correlation coefficient between the estimated surface available energy and the measured is 0.92 and the root mean squares difference (RMSD) is 30.4w.m^-2, the correlation coefficient between the estimated surface evapotranspiration and the measured value is 0.85 and RMSD is 21.3w.m^-2. The above differences are mainly caused by: 1) the scale difference between the field measurement and the MODIS observation; 2) the non-closure problem of the surface energy balance from the surface fluxes observations; and 3) the effects of the horizontal and vertical advection on flux measurements.

By using observed phenological and meteorological data from 1978 to 2007 at Guiyang station, the variation of 71 woody plants' five primary phenophases and their responses to climate change were analyzed, especially focused on the link between phenophases changes and climate changes before the phenophase onset, including leaf bud sprouting, first leaf unfolding, first flowering, leaf fully coloring and leaf fully defoliation. Conclusions are obtained as follows. 1) Since 1978, the mean annual temperature has dropped in oscillations totally, and decreased sharply after 2000, of which summer (June to August) temperature declined markedly, but spring (February to April) temperature had no clear variation except a slight increase of February temperature. 2) Three spring phenophases showed advancement generally, with advancement of 17 days for leaf bud sprouting, advancement of 15.5 days for first leaf unfolding and advancement of 16.7 days for first flowering during the past 30 years. But in the meantime, autumn phenophase delayed, with 19 days deleyed in leaf fully coloring and 14.3 days postponed of leaf fully defoliation. 3) Statistically significant correlation was found between the changes of spring phenophases and the mean temperature of one or several months before the phenophase onset, and the mean monthly temperature of February was the key indicator to the three spring phenophases. With 1℃ increase of monthly temperature of February, leaf bud sprouting, first leaf unfolding and first flowering advanced 3.4 days, 3.3 days and 3.1days, respectively. In addition, the sunshine duration change in February or March also played an important role in advancement of spring phenophase. 4) The variation of phenophases in autumn and winter had no clear relationship with the monthly temperature, precipitation and sunshine duration respectively, due to the complexity of the autumn phenological variations and wide influence on them.

Based on regional land-use and eco-environment system, an index system and complex matter element model were established. The evaluation model was applied to Harbin City, at the scope of which the assessment of spatial differences of the land-use and eco-environment situation among the county-level regions were conducted. The results indicated that: Firstly it is applicable for the matter element analysis to deal with the evaluation of regional land-use and eco-environment. The result revealed that there were obvious spatial differences among the county-level regions in terms of the land-use and eco-environment coordination situations. Secondly, the single index information based on the matter element model helps to find out the key elements affecting the land-use and eco-environment coordination situations, for example, most county-level regions are confronted with relatively low intensive land-use level and eco-environmental risks such as soil pollution, soil erosion and fragile ecological functions of wetland. The research result coincides with the actual situation. Thirdly, regional sustainable land-use, improvement of eco-environment quality and sustainable regional development of Harbin City depend on formulating different regional measures for land eco-environment control and active guidance to prevention and control of land degradation, and etc.