Assessment of Suitability of Land Uses using a Multi-Source Information Fusion Method: A Case Study in the Hilly Area of Shandong Peninsular of China

Land is one of the most important natural resources. The assessment of the current land use pattern suitability can help people make good use of the natural resources. In this paper, the land-use suitability index (SI) is used to evaluate the suitability of the land use pattern in the hilly area of Shandong Peninsular of China. Land use data is derived from Landsat TM/ETM acquired in 1988 and 2000 using the multi-source information fusion method. The results indicate that, the land-use suitability is slightly improved from 1988 to 2000 and the corresponding SI-values changed from 0.77 to 0.80. The difference value of land-use suitability is only 0.03, not as large as people previously predicted.