Assessment of Land Use Functions of Northeast China

The ability of land uses providing multiple services is defined as Land Use Functions (LUFs). We divided multifunction of land use into 10 LUFs among the three dimensions of sustainability-social, economic and environmental and assessed the sustainability of land use in Northeast China based on Spatial Regional Reference Framework. Northeast China had both higer sustainability and greater improvement inland use than China's national condition in the 1985-2005 period. Component LUFs showed a trend of being less homogeneous due to unbalanced improvement of land use at regional scale of northeast China. Unbalanced improvement of land use could also be observed at provicial level. As a whole, northeast China faced both the challenges of sustainable land use and the great potential for improvement of LUFs.