Coordinative development between land use change and regional Population-Resources-Environment-Development System—A case study of Jiangsu Province

Land use change has significant influence on the operation of the Population-Resources-Environment-Development (PRED) System. Moderate land use is the key factor to ensure the coordinative and sustainable development between land use and PRED system. Based on the internal relationship between land use and PRED system, a PRED evaluation index system and a Press-Status-Response (PSR) model were established in this study. According to the expounding on the mechanism of the PSR model, we investigated the coordinative development between the changes of regional land use and PRED system taking Jiangsu Province as an example. The results showed that the orders of the Synthetic Index of Land Use (SILU) and the Variation of PRED Index (VPI) in Jiangsu are both the southern Jiangsu>the central Jiangsu>the northern Jiangsu. A cubic curve model was used to fit the relationship between the VPI and SILU. The inflection point of VPI was situated in 5.0 of SILU. When SILU was below 5.0, VPI increased with SILU, which will be helpful to the coordinative development between land use and PRED system. Based on those results, it is suggested that the land use degree of the southern Jiangsu, especially that of Nanjing City, should be moderately controlled at present, while land resources of the central Jiangsu and the northern Jiangsu should be further exploited.