Optimizing land use allocation is a challenging task, as it involves multiple stakeholders with conflicting objectives. In addition, the solution space of the optimization grows exponentially as the size of the region and the resolution increase. This article presents a new ant colony optimization algorithm by incorporating multiple types of ants for solving complex multiple land use allocation problems. A spatial exchange mechanism is used to deal with competition between different types of land use allocation. This multi-type ant colony optimization optimal multiple land allocation (MACO-MLA) model was successfully applied to a case study in Panyu, Guangdong, China, a large region with an area of 1,454,285 cells. The proposed model took only about 25 minutes to find near-optimal solution in terms of overall suitability, compactness, and cost. Comparison indicates that MACO-MLA can yield better performances than the simulated annealing (SA) and the genetic algorithm (GA) methods. It is found that MACO-MLA has an improvement of the total utility value over SA and GA methods by 4.5% and 1.3%, respectively. The computation time of this proposed model amounts to only 2.6% and 12.3%, respectively, of that of the SA and GA methods. The experiments have demonstrated that the proposed model was an efficient and effective optimization technique for generating optimal land use patterns.

An accurate estimation of soil organic matter (SOM) content for spatial non-point prediction is an important driving force for the agricultural carbon cycle and sustainable productivity. This study proposed a hybrid geostatistical method of extreme learning machine-ordinary kriging (ELMOK), to predict the spatial variability of the SOM content. To assess the feasibility of ELMOK, a case study was conducted in a regional scale study area in Shaanxi Province, China. A total of 472 topsoil (0–20 cm) samples were collected. A total of 14 auxiliary variables (predictors) were obtained from remote sensing data and environmental factors. The proposed method was compared with the ability of traditional geostatistical methods such as simple kriging (SK) and ordinary kriging (OK), in addition to hybrid geostatistical methods such as regression-ordinary kriging (ROK) and artificial neural network-ordinary kriging (ANNOK). The results showed that the extreme learning machines (ELM) model used principal components (PCs) as input variables, and performed better than both multiple linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural network (ANN) models. Compared with geostatistical and hybrid geostatistical prediction methods of SOM spatial distribution, the ELMOK model had the highest coefficient of determination (R² = 0.671) and ratio of performance to deviation (RPD = 2.05), as well as the lowest root mean square error (RMSE = 1.402 g kg⁻¹). In conclusion, the application of remote sensing imagery and environmental factors has a deeper driven significance of a non-linear and multi-dimensional hierarchy relationship for explaining the spatial variability of SOM, tracing local carbon sink and high quality SOM maps. More importantly, it is possibly concluded that the sustainable monitoring of SOM is a significant process through the pixel-based revisit sampling, an analysis of the mapping results of SOM, and methodological integration, which is the primary step in spatial variations and time series. The proposed ELMOK methodology is a promising and effective approach which can play a vital role in predicting the spatial variability of SOM at a regional scale.

Spatial optimization is complex because it usually involves numerous spatial factors and constraints. The optimization becomes more challenging if a large set of spatial data with fine resolutions are used. This article presents an agent-based model for optimal land allocation (AgentLA) by maximizing the total amount of land-use suitability and the compactness of patterns. The essence of the optimization is based on the collective efforts of agents for formulating the optimal patterns. A local and global search strategy is proposed to inform the agents to select the sites properly. Three sets of hypothetical data were first used to verify the optimization effects. AgentLA was then applied to the solution of the actual land allocation optimization problems in Panyu city in the Pearl River Delta. The study has demonstrated that the proposed method has better performance than the simulated annealing method for solving complex spatial optimization problems. Experiments also indicate that the proposed model can produce patterns that are very close to the global optimums.