Regional land use transitions driven by the adaptive reconciliation of existing land use conflict with socioeconomic development can lead to positive economic effects as well as new land use conflict. Although research on land use transition has progressed considerably, limited studies have explored the spatiotemporal dynamic pattern of land use conflict during the land use transition period. Previous evaluation approaches on land use conflict that mainly focus on status or potential conflict lack conflict intensity evaluation during the land use transition process. A new spatially explicit evaluation framework of land use conflict that directly examines three aspects of conflict, namely, ecological and agricultural (EAC), agricultural and construction (ACC), and ecological and construction (ECC) land conflicts based on ecological quality and agricultural suitability, is proposed in this study. The spatiotemporal dynamic pattern and driving factors of land use conflict in the Yangtze River Economic Belt of China in the period of 2000–2018 are evaluated. The results indicated that comprehensive land use conflict (CLUC) intensity slightly decreased by 9.91% and its barycenter showed a trend toward the west during 2000–2018. ACC is the most drastic conflict among the three aspects of conflict. The mean intensity of ACC reduced remarkably by 38.26%, while EAC increased by 33.15% and ECC increased by 28.28% during the research periods. The barycenter of EAC moved toward the east while the barycenter of ACC and ECC moved toward the west. The changes in the intensity and spreading pattern of land use conflict indices demonstrated the changes in the pattern of territorial space development. Total population, population density, per capita GDP, number of mobile phone users, and road density were strong drivers that influenced the land use conflict of territorial space. Multiple policy recommendations including improving territorial space planning and governance ability, and improving land use efficiency, were proposed to manage and resolve the land use conflict of territorial space. The results and conclusions of this study will help improve future regional land use policies and reduce land use conflict.

Chinese cities are experiencing rapid urban expansion and being transformed into more dispersed urban form which necessitate the quantification of fine-scale intra-urban characteristics for sustainable urban development. We propose an integrated multi-level and multi-dimensional method to characterize urban sprawl and apply it to Wuhan, a typical metropolitan area in central China from 1996 to 2006. The specifications of levels are parcel at micro-level, district at meso-level and metropolitan area at macro-level. The measurements are implemented in seven dimensions: composition, configuration, gradient, density, proximity, accessibility and dynamics. Metrics are assigned to each dimension and innovative metrics such as derived contagion index, distance-based correlation coefficient and weighted centroid migration are defined to quantify the sprawling process. This bottom-up approach is capable of exploring spatio-temporal variation of urban growth at finer scales, capturing the multi-dimensional features of urban sprawl and providing policy implications for authorities at different levels. The results reveal that industrial sites and built-up land for special use are the most scattered and randomly distributed land use types, parcels and districts at the urban fringe present higher fragmentation than those in the urban core areas and urban expansion is largely enforced by assigning development zones.

In the context of rural revitalization strategies and humans’ increasing leisure pursuit, leisure agriculture starts to act as a new engine of rural economic growth and industrial upgradation. Unraveling the agri-leisure developmental regularity from a spatial perspective facilitates urban-rural integration and poverty alleviation in rural regions. Given the lack of spatially analyzing agri-leisure (e.g., sightseeing picking orchards) especially at the macro-spatial scale (e.g., the national scale), this study aims to explore the spatiality of leisure agriculture and its fundamental driving mechanisms based on geo-visual (spatially visualizing) analytical tools looking at 20,778 picking orchards in China. Results show that: (1) Picking orchards are distributed in the form of clusters with striking disparity at multiple spatial scales; (2) Five spatial agglomerations are found involving the regions around Beijing and Tianjin, Shandong hinterland, Henan hinterland, the core district of the Yangtze Delta, and the core district of the Pearl River Delta; (3) The driving mechanisms are revealed, and the spatial pattern of picking orchards is found to be largely influenced by morphology, distance to central cities, traffic conditions, economic level, and tourism resources. This study is conducive to optimizing the spatial planning of rural eco-tourism towards sustainable agro-development.