Study on Population Distribution Characteristics and Pattern in Mountainous Region

Population distribution is provided with obvious dispersion and diversity speciality in hill and mountainous region there agriculture production is dominant. Analyzing population distribution on hamlet scale approaches fact much more. Improvements in remote sensing (RS) technologies and the use of geographic information system (GIS) are increasingly allowing us to probe into population distribution at multiple scales. This paper researches population distribution characteristics and regulations in hill and mountainous region based on village scale using GIS and RS, to take Tianshui district as an example. Tianshui is located to the transition region from Qinling mountain to loess hill, when distinguishing scale reduces from all territory, county, township to village, the disproportion phenomena that population distribution is sparse or dense in space stands out more and more, cv. expands rapidly. In 7915 spots being composed of towns, villages and settlements, less spots with 1.0-10 hm² acreage account for 84.7%, this indicates dispersive and small scale villages are still primary form of population distribution. The relationships among population density and land-use proportion of villages, spot number on unit acreage and spot size are analyzed by non-linearity function, some characteristics and pattern in population distribution may be revealed well. Population distribution of Tianshui represent obviously three categories: river valley area with high density, hilly area with medium density and mountainous area with low density, labour radii and distance among villages exist huge difference in three categories.