An Example of Handling the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem on the Study of Land Use Driving Forces of the Farming-Pasturing Interlocked Area of Northern China

摘要

The "modifiable areal unit" is an unavoidable problem in the spatial statistical analysis based on areal data. This paper explored the driving mechanism of the land use change of the farming-pasturing interlocked areas (FPIA) from mid 1980s to end 1990s from a multi-scale perspective. The findings shows that the exponent beta coefficient, reflecting the relationship between driving forces and land-use change (farmland expansion/grassland shrinkage as examples), varies remarkably with different research scale, which make it necessary to conduct multi-scale analysis in constructing models on the research of regional land-use change. A framework to handle the modifiable areal unit problems has been designed and implemented to assure the accuracy and reasonability in the studies.