Evolution of land use in coal-based cities based on the ecological niche theory: A case study in Shuozhou City, China

With the rapid development changes and the special land-use patterns, coal-based cities (CBCs) have faced many critical sustainability issues such as the effective use of land resources, the mitigation of land supply-demand contradictions. How does the development of CBCs in China affected local land-use changes and what status does each land type occupy? The relevant mechanisms are not clear. Shuozhou City, a typical growth CBC in China, was therefore selected as the research area to investigate the land use evolution by introducing the theory of land use ecological niche (LUEN). The dynamic changes of land use from 1990 to 2018 were analyzed, and cultivated land played a significant role in the process of land transformation with the highest utilization degree, followed by grassland and construction land. The cultivated land and mining land occupied the economic niche, construction land occupied the social niche, and forest land, grassland, and water area occupied the natural niche. From 2010 to 2015, construction land and mining land occupied the prevailing position of the land-use system. The substantial expansion and compression of the land use ecological niche in Shuozhou City were in the early stage of city development, and there was not a major change in the later stage. In general, the spatial distribution of land use ecological niche was in the east-west direction. Therefore, the production function zone, living function zone, and ecological function zone were delineated. The status, role, and function of land use type should be prioritized when developing land-use planning, considering the mechanisms of land-use change. Governments should actively break through the restrictions of coal resources mining on land use change while giving full play to the role of land resource assets in promoting sustainable development.