Evaluation of Oasis Land Use Security and Sustainable Utilization Strategies in a Typical Watershed in the Arid Regions of China

In recent years, human activities have an increasing impact on land use patterns in the arid regions of northwest China. Located in the Xinjiang, the Manas River Basin holds various geomorphological types and is characterized by a mountain-oasis-desert system. In addition, the basin is also the economic core area on the north side of the Tianshan Mountains. Therefore, many scholars did much research on the variation of land use patterns in this region. However, there are hardly any reports on the sustainability of land utilization in the Manas River Basin.

Based on the methods of analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy synthetic evaluation model, social economy and land use/cover data from remote sensing images for 1976, 1987, 1998 and 2010, Prof. XU Hailiang and his research team analyzed the land use security of the Manas River Basin using 15 evaluation indexes from three subsystems (including land use suitability, land use vulnerability and water security) to provide a comprehensive evaluation. The above-mentioned indexes were classified into four levels, which were regarded as security (v₁), relative security (v₂), security threshold (v₃) and insecurity (v₄).

The result showed that the land use securities of oases in the Manas River Basin were at the insecurity level of v₄, and synthetic graded values in the four periods were 0.6150, 0.5772, 0.5617 and 0.5640, respectively. Suitability degrees of land use in the four periods were all at the security level of v₁, and the total scores of vulnerable degree of land use in the four years were v₁, v₂, v₄, and v₄, showing a continuous decline trend. In addition, water resources securities in the four periods all belonged to the insecurity levels.

The result is important to promote the sustainable land utilization in the Manas River Basin, find out the leading factors that restrict the land use security, and then put forward corresponding solutions. This research has been published in the international journal of Environmental Earth Sciences in November 2013.