China’s Spatially-explicit Historical Land-use Data and Its Reconstruction Methodology

To facilitate the study of spatiotemporal dynamics of land-use and its impacts on climate and ecology,it is crucial to reconstruct the historical land-use in long time series.Some scholars have made efforts to reconstruct the quantitative information on China’s historical land-use,but the results were presented as statistical information in the administrative units without geographical distribution characteristics,which limits their applications in climatic and ecological models.Thus it is necessary to discuss the ways to reconstruct spatially-explicit historical land-use data.This paper presents a review,from a methodological point of view,on the historical land-use databases with spatial-explicit characteristics such as SAGE and HYDE,hoping to come up with better ways to reconstruct China’s spatial historical land-use data and to provide data-support for the simulations of land-use change and its impacts on regional climate and ecology.The authors expound the relationship between different materials and their roles in historical reconstruction;emphasize the dual functions of population data in quantitative reconstruction and spatial allocation as well as its limitations;analyze the hypothesis of spatial allocation methods and the degree of dependency of different methods on current land-use patterns.In final discussions,the authors argue that more attention needs to be paid to the historical reconstruction of forest for the sake of the study on historical terrestrial carbon cycle,recommend to use the method of‘typical year control’to deal with the impacts of unquantifiable socio-economic factors on historical land-use patterns,and propose to make separate reconstructions for different regions and put more focus on the integrated regional studies in the future.