Agricultural land, as an important carbon source, has produced about 20% of carbon dioxide globally. The calculation and spatial-temporal distribution of carbon emissions resulting from agricultural land utilization (ALU) has attracted a great deal of attention from scholars. Most of the existing literature widely agrees that China’s carbon emissions from ALU showed significant regional discrepancies, but rarely pays attention to the evolutionary characteristics of the discrepancies. This study calculated the total carbon emissions from ALU based on six kinds of carbon emissions sources in the 31 provinces of mainland China, which showed obviously different characteristics in terms of their abundances of agricultural land resources, relative scarcities of production factors, levels of science and technology and economic prosperity. We then analyzed the evolutionary process and characteristics of regional discrepancies in carbon emissions from ALU at the national level and regional level with the method of kernel density estimation. The key results demonstrated the following: (1) The carbon emissions from ALU in the whole country and the eastern, central and western regions of China have increased sharply during the study period. From 2000 to 2015, the carbon emissions from ALU in the whole of China, the eastern region, central region, and western region were increased by 2626.11 (10⁴ tons), 441.32 (10⁴ tons), 1054.45 (10⁴ tons), and 1130.3 (10⁴ tons), respectively, with an average annual growth rate of 2.75%, 1.29%, 3%, and 4.35%, respectively; (2) The scale of carbon emissions from ALU showed significant spatial disparities at the regional and inter-provincial levels. From 2000 to 2015, the central region had the highest carbon emissions from ALU, while the eastern and western regions had the second and third highest carbon emissions; (3) The distribution curves of carbon emissions from ALU in the whole country and each region all moved in the right direction gradually during the study period, and the width of the curves increased, indicating the regional discrepancies of carbon emissions from ALU was expanding at different spatial scales. Distribution curves of carbon emissions from ALU in the eastern, central and western regions all showed a “multi-polar” differentiation phenomenon in 2000, while presented a “tri-polar”, “bipolar” and “multi-polar” division in 2015, respectively.

The relationship between rural labor transfer and cultivated land use has always been a hot topic in academic field and government management. Here, by using the large‐scale survey data of 1868 farmers from 37 villages in Jianghan Plain and the low‐hill areas in southeastern Hubei province, we investigated the relationship between rural labor force transfer and decision making in cultivated land use from the perspective of terrain heterogeneity. The findings indicate that under different terrain conditions, there are significant differences in the decision making of farmers concerning cultivated land use, leading to different land use efficiencies in different areas. Specifically, rural labor force transfer enhances land use efficiency in plain areas; however, it does not affect that in the low‐hill areas. In addition, we found that in the plain areas, improving the quality of rural household labor can increase the cultivated land use efficiency, while in low‐hill areas, enhancement of geographical accessibility is the key to improving land use efficiency.

In a city, housing price varies with location. Thus, housing price plays an important role in detecting the spatial pattern of the city. Spatial interpolation methods have been widely used for simulating and predicting urban housing prices. In this paper, the Ordinary Kriging interpolation method is used for producing the digital elevation model (DEM) of urban housing prices. Based on the three-dimensional DEM of urban housing price, this paper develops a novel approach for geo–visual analytics of urban housing prices. To investigate and visualize the spatial morphology of housing price, we design the Water-flooding, Section-cutting and Belt-floating methods, and implement these methods with the 3D-analyst module in GIS environment. Then, we take Wuhan City as a case, apply this approach to analyze the complex spatial morphologic characteristics of the DEM for housing price and visualize the results from the multidimensional perspectives. The results show that the Water-flooding method effectively supports the investigation of the top areas of surface changes; Section-cutting method performs well in examining the profile or cross-section of the urban housing surface; and Belt-floating method is helpful for detecting the spatial variance of the urban housing surface through the routes of specific lines. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach works better than traditional methods in describing the complex spatial morphology of urban housing prices, and has an advantage in visualizing the analysis results.