Assessing regional sustainability: the case of land use and land cover change in the middle Yiluo catchment of the Yellow River basin, China

Land use in long-settled areas outside zones especially affected by climatic change and not much or long subject to rapid economic development can be shown to reflect sustainable practice. The research reported here used terrain characteristics of such areas lover five landuse types) to establish a benchmark framework for assessing land-use suitability. The paper shows that such a framework can be used to assess the degree of sustainability of land-use changes, the latter being identified by analysis of Lime-lapse (1996-9) Landsat Thematic Mapper data. The assessment framework comprises a hybrid physically/statistically based model, suitable for deployment in sustainability assessment requiring comparatively fine spatial resolution. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.