Coupling relationship between rural settlements and rural population and its spatiotemporal characteristics in Zhejiang Province of China

Land resource has been the most important assets in rural areas. Among them, the relationship between human activities and land in rural areas has been one of the most important influencing factors for land conservation and intensive utilization, urban-rural integration, rural revitalization and common prosperity. This study aims to explore the land use and land cover remote sensing monitoring dataset (CNLUCC) and population data. Five-period monitoring data of land use was taken from Zhejiang Province, China from 2000 to 2020. Firstly, the land-use dynamics were used to characterize the change degree of rural settlements during the study period. Secondly, the land use transfer matrix between rural settlements and land types was constructed to identify the transfer direction and stage features of rural settlements using the geologic map. The intensive utilization of rural settlements per capita was taken as the baseline to evaluate the coordination between human activities and land source. Furthermore, the "differentiation + consistency" was adopted to combine with the per capita construction land area standard of villages. Finally, the decoupling model was used to analyze the evolution of the decoupling type and the human-land coupling relationship between rural settlements and population. As such, the specific development strategy of zoning was proposed to coordinate the relationship between human activities and land. The results showed that: 1) The rural settlements were concentrated mainly in the plain area of the northern, the hilly basin area of the central and the coastal area of the southeast, indicating a pattern of multi-regional concentration and global dispersion. In terms of time, the rural settlements were continued to expand from 2000 to 2015, and then was shrunk from 2015 to 2020. In order to adjust the structure of rural residential land, cultivated land was the main transfer-in source, whereas, the urban and cultivated land were the main transfer-out sources. 2) The per capita rural settlement area showed a continuous upward trend in the time series. The spatial pattern showed the significant spatial agglomeration. Specifically, the high-value areas were concentrated in the northern Plain, whereas, the low-value areas were in the southwestern mountainous areas. The per capita rural settlement area was ever rising in various regions, particularly with the economic development and urbanization. But the large base of the plain area was aggravated the imbalance between human activities and land. While the small base of the hilly and mountainous areas were relatively coordinated in the relationship between human activities and land. 3) The decoupling relationship between rural population and rural settlements at the county level was mainly dominated by strong negative decoupling, that is, the regional rural population declined, while the area of rural settlements was maintained an upward trend. The number of counties with strong negative decoupling relationship decreased from 2000 to 2020, but there was the still serious imbalance of rural human-land coupling relationship. The findings are of great significance to regulate the relationship between human activities and land, in order to promote the effective allocation and efficient utilization of rural land resources.