Study on the Temporal and Spatial Variation of the Land Use within the Framework of Niche Theory: Case Study of Jiangsu Province

Accompanied with the rapid industrialization and urbanization in China, the shortage of resources becomes the most important factor which limits the development, especially in the developed districts such as the Yangtze River Delta. Land resource is the base of economic development but China´s per capita land resource is so lack as to support the economic development. So how to put land resource to rational use becomes a key problem. The marginal utility is the basic reason which causes the change of land use. According to the theory of Niche this paper quantitatively calculated interactive intensities in different land use types and studied the temporal and spatial variation of land use Niche of Jiangsu Province. The results showed that the gap of Niche between agricultural and non-agricultural land in Jiangsu was growing up at a rate of 0.17% every year during 1999-2005 which we can conclude the protection on agricultural land becomes more difficult. At the same time the gap between the south, middle and north of Jiangsu was expanding too. Barycenter of land use Niche and economics in Jiangsu from 1999-2005 was also studied and the result showed they were moving to south-east of Jiangsu. This paper presented that urbanization could absorb the redundant labors in the country which led to increase the Niche of arable land and Jiangsu can maintain dynamic balance of cropland by regulating land use of different area as a whole body.