Special Column:Celebration of the 70th Anniversary of IGSNRR, CAS
ZHONG Tai-yang, HUANG Xian-jin
This paper gives a comprehensive description of the researches of land use change at farm
household level from the four aspects of investigation respect,research content,study method and
data collecting means, and summarizes the features of the researches on land use change at farm
household level.The main features are: ( 1)Most of the researches give notices on the land use
change of hot regions, particularly on the tropical-forest area. ( 2) Lots of the researches attribute
the land use changes on the pressure of subsistence to the population growth and the agriculture
expansion which is also related with the population growth. ( 3) The attention of researches is
being converted from land use type change to both land use conversion and land use intensity
change. ( 4)More and more methods are applied by the researches of land use change at farm
household level and integrated methods are appreciated by more and more studies. ( 5) The
impacts of the decision-making behaviors of land users or managers on land use change are
emphasized by most researches. ( 6) The social survey using questionnaires becomes a main toolof data collecting,but more and more investigations combine the social survey using questionnaires
and the techniques of “3S” to get the data on land use change and its driving forces at farm
household level, and devote to connecting the social survey data and the remote sensing data.
Although much progress has been made in theory and practice of land use change research at
farm household level, and some important results have been obtained, there still have certain
problems in previous researches.These problems go as follows:the results of land use change
study at farm household level can not be easily applied to other microeconomic agents, the
results in one region should be much carefully applied to any other regions, the relation and
interaction between different hierarchical data have been neglected, the acquiring cost of data
which contains economic data and its corresponding space information is still an obstacle for the
land use change research at agricultural household level, and the relation between spacial
characteristics of farm household’s behaviors and the land use change’s spatial distribution has
not been adequately emphasized.Furthermore, some suggestions of further studies on land use
change at agricultural household level are put forward in this paper.These suggestions include
applying multiple-level research angle, using game theory to analyze the land use change
determined by the interaction of different agents, applying multilevel analysis in empirical study,
emphasizing the impact of spacial characteristics of farm household’s behaviors on land use
change and its spatial distribution, improving data acquisition means, building continuous survey
system comp-rising of given farm households and so on.