Spatiotemporal pattern of coupling coordination degree between land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency in China

There is a complex interaction mechanism between land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency, and research on their coupling coordination is of great significance to promote urban sustainable development and construction of ecological civilization. Based on the definition of land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency, this paper established an evaluation index system to measure land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency respectively. Firstly, the entropy weight method and the non-expected output super-efficient SBM model were employed to evaluate and measure the land intensive use degree and regional ecological efficiency of 284 prefecture-level cities from 2004 to 2016 in China respectively. Secondly, the coupling coordination degree model was adopted to evaluate their coordination degree, and the paper analyzed the spatial-temporal evolution characteristics of coupling coordination degree. The spatial auto-correlation method was employed to measure the spatial correlation pattern of the coupling coordination degree between intensive land use and regional ecological efficiency. The results showed that the coordination of land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency of prefecture-level city was in a mild imbalance stage at present in the whole, and the coupling coordination degree between the two increased over the time. The spatial distribution of the coordination between land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency showed a pattern of “higher in the mid and east, lower in the west”; and the spatial distribution of the coupling coordination degree between the two had little transformation over the time. The global spatial auto-correlation results showed that there was a significant positive correlation of the coupling coordination degree between land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency, and the correlation degree between the two increased first and then weakened over the time. The results of local spatial auto-correlation analysis showed that there were four types of the coordination spatial association between land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency, these were the spatial positive correlation type including high-high aggregation (HH) and low-low aggregation (LL) and the spatial negative correlation type including high-low aggregation (HL) and low-high aggregation (LH). The results showed that spatial positive correlation type of HH and LH were mainly distributed in the east, and the spatial negative correlation type of HL and LL were mainly distributed in the middle region, the types of HH, LH and LL emerged as the shape of cluster and always had a powerful agglomeration, and the LH type distributed discretely; except for the HL type, the overall pattern of the spatial distribution of the other types were stable over the time relatively and only the number increased or decreased partially. The major findings derived from the study can be summarized as follows: it is necessary to implement scientific environmental economic and environmental technology policies, strengthen differentiated monitoring and management of cities, carry out district management and control rationally and promote technical and innovation cooperation between cities. Only in this way, can we enhance the coordination of land intensive use and regional ecological efficiency, then promote the sustainable development of the cities. © 2020, Editorial Department of the Transactions of the Chinese Society of Agricultural Engineering. All right reserved.