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Achieving sustainable development through China's national territory spatial planning requires comprehensive knowledge of all land characteristics. This paper introduces a land-type map of Jiangsu province (104 km2) in eastern China to provide such knowledge. The land-type map focuses on both physical geographic components (e.g. climate types, landforms, and soil types) and human-related components (e.g. land-use types and intensities). These components were represented by parameter layers and integrated with the help of the Geographic Information System (GIS) overlay function. A hierarchical land-type classification system was generated to provide land mapping units that represented certain degrees of geographic homogeneity and land-use potential. Trading off the relationship between resource protection and resource utilization, the space of Jiangsu was divided into seven land-use zones with different land-use policies based on the land-type map. The land-type map can thus be taken into consideration for land planning and management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a decision support system (DSS) for evaluation of the ecological benefits of rehabilitation of coal mine waste areas. The system was used as a tool to evaluate the ecological benefits; it supported users to select the proper models and index systems according to the waste type or the users' predilection. The DSS was applied in the Fuxin coal mine dump area. Our novel integrated web-GIS DSS was implemented using a web server and ServletExec technology over an ArclMS plat form to support data access and processing in a distributed environment. The DSS allows the generation and evaluation of suitable alternatives with respect to salient features of the problem, especially environmental consequences. The paper describes the identification and collection of relevant information, the structure of a database, the design of algorithms for solving the core location problem, the study of models for evaluating the different alternatives and their framing in a complete multicriteria decision model. In particular, the model management subsystem supports the user to choose a corresponding algorithm and modify the index for ecological benefits. Finally, the solution of the case study, by means of the DSS, is described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The definition of "Digital Water Conservancy" is proposed on the basis of "Digital Earth" in this paper. The necessity, feasibility, construction principles of "Digital Water Conservancy" are analysed, and the framework of it is proposed, that is: key technology, basic infrastructure, and comprehensive applications. The key technology is composed of spatial information technology, management information technology, and comprehensive information technology; the basic infrastructure consists of National Information Infrastructure (Nil), National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), special data of water conservancy and security measures; the comprehensive applications are made up of the management system, decision-making models, and application systems. The above three levels supply hardware and solftware to water conservancy around data acquisition and updating, processing and accessing, information extraction and analysis, propagation of information, building and updating of databases, web and transmission, and decision-making support. A spatial information infrastructure, special data of water conservancy, and decision-making models are the core and are discussed in detail. Digital Water Conservancy is a large and complex systematic engineering, but it can be regarded as being composed of points (reservoirs and lakes), lines (rivers and their watersheds), and regions (oceans). A digital reservoir analysis is carried out in Xue Ye Reservoir, Shandong Province to provide experience for informatisation of water conservancy in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ecological environment in the Tarim River Basin is extremely fragile. The ecological problems resulting from local economic development in this region have been a hot topic for the ecological scientists. There is a new trend to use information technologies to monitor the ecological environment dynamically by means of the modem information technologies. To meet the constant requirements of long-term monitoring of a region ecological environment, this paper focuses on the vegetation coverage and land desertification on the basis of the information technologies of remote sensing (RS), geographic positioning systems (GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), and data warehouse, applying the theory of the integrative spatial and attribute data, seamless integration of multi-source data. The ecological environment for the lower reaches of the Tarim River is analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The investigated database is established and managed through multisource and multi-type massive data, which are collected from three periods of the remote sensing images and background data in 1999, 2002 and 2004, respectively. The methods of system classification, remote sensing interpretation, vegetation coverage, conversion models construction, and massive data built database are applied to analyse the data concerned during the dynamically monitoring the ecological environment in the Tarim River Basin. The results show that the vegetation coverage has increased gradually each year after the emergent water transportation project was started, whereas the desertification area has decreased, some sand areas have obviously retreated. The speed of improvement in the east part of the river has been higher than in the west. The ecological environment in the lower reaches of the Tarim River has tended to improve after the emergent water transportation project in the lower reaches of the Tarim River Basin. In conclusion, the emergent water delivery plays a decisive and significant role in promoting the ecological environment in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]