Human settlement suitability assessment considering climate and DEM

China´s urbanization is growing rapidly, suitable land for human settlement was limited, and how to plan as a whole to guarantee the food security and the human living became a hot topic. In this paper, we use ecological niche modeling, Maxent, to explore the human settlement suitability in China based on 19 climate variables and DEM. 75% of the 3167 current settlement points was selected as samples to build the model, and the rest points was used to test the model performance. When we used only climate variables to model the human settlement suitability, the AUC value for training and test was 0.783 and 0.766. Then, we added DEM and its derived variables, the AUC value for training and test was raised to 0.812 and 0.802. The predicted higher proper extent was coincidence with population distribution and the main city distribution, which includes Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei Province, Shandong Province, Henan Province, Jiangsu Province, Anhui Province, Hubei Province, Sichuan Province and Shaanxi Province. The most important variables were terrain factors, DEM and slope with percent contribution 23.4% and 20.7%, Annual Mean Temperature and Annual Precipitation with percent contribution 15.1% and 10.2%. This research could give some advises for the overall urban planning.