Land resources science is a new discipline taking land resources as an integrated research object. Marked progress made in comprehensive research covers the following aspects: investigation and exploitation of land resources;evaluation of land resources types and characteristics,quantity and quality;land resources consolidation and transformation;sustainable land resources use and management;land use general planning and land resources strategy;optimal land use allocation and its intensive use; and land resources security and ecological friendly land use model.Based on the analysis of the research progress in land resources sciences and reviewing the main achievements of Chinese land resources discipline in recent years, this paper discusses deeply on the tasks and prospects of land resources discipline development along with the rapid national economic and social development,predicts the developmental trend of land resources science on the basis of analyzing the developmental goal and prospect of land resources discipline.Furthermore, it puts forward that there are eight key development fields and main research directions of land resources science in China.The key research fields and directions of land resources science in the future are as follows:(1)To enhance the theoretic study of land resources discipline,especially land resource classification,driving forces and impacts of LUCC,innovation of land resources discipline system;(2)to attach importance to macro strategic study of land resource,especially the optimal strategy of land resource and sustainable use models under the guidance of sciences developmental views;(3)to promote the research and application of the new ideas,new principle,new technology and new methods of general land use planning in order to serve well for the regional decision-making of socio-economic harmonious development;(4)to study deeply the evaluation index system,technical methods of intensive land use,probe into the criterion of optimal land use and standard of regional and industrial land use;(5)to strengthen research of the principle,model and demonstration of land resource safe and ecological friendly land use in order to put forward the sciences guidance for realizing sustainable land use;(6)to study theory,method and ensuring system of the modern landscape land consolidation,and the mechanism and models to upgrade intergraded productivity of land resources;(7)to probe into the management model and policy of rural land resources,especially study the science ways for land-lost farmer employment,and food security and arable land protection based on the analysis of new condition and new question of regional development; and (8)to study and develop the land resource information system,and make the most of"3S"technology,model method and expert decision-making system to realize the informationization and systematization in the process of land resource research and management.