Land use change and its eco-environmental responses are foci in geographical research. As a region with uneven economic development, land use change and eco-environmental responses across Jiangsu Province are relevant to China's overall development pattern. The external function of regional land use changes during different stages of economic development. In this study, we proposed a novel classification system based on the dominant function of land use according to "production-ecology-life", and then analyzed land use change and regional eco-environmental responses from a functional perspective of regional development. The results showed that from 1985 to 2008, land use change features in Jiangsu were that productive land area decreased and eco- logical and living land areas increased. Land use changes in southern Jiangsu were the most dramatic. In southern and central parts of Jiangsu the agricultural production function weakened and urban life service function strengthened; in northern Jiangsu, the mining production function's comparative advantage highlighted that the rural life service function was weakening. Ecological environmental quality decreased slightly in Jiangsu and its three regions. The maximum contribution rate to ecological environmental change occurred in southern Jiangsu and the minimum rate was located in the north. Eco-environmental quality deteriorated in southern and central Jiangsu, related to expanding construction land in urban and rural areas. Ecological environmental quality deterioration in northern Jiangsu is probably due to land development and consolidation. The main reason for improvements in regional ecological environments is that agricultural production land was converted to water ecological land across Jiangsu.
Based on the land use change data obtained from the interpretation of remote sensing images in 1985, 1995, 2005 and 2008, the research applied principal component analysis, Markov chain and ESDA method, and took cultivated land patch as the basic unit of landscape. A comprehensive measure of the fragmentation of cultivated land was made in Jiangsu counties and its temporal and spatial evolution characteristics and driving process from the perspective of landscape ecology were discussed. The results are as follows:(1)The overall fragmentation of cultivated land in Jiangsu Province presents that the eastern coastal areas are low, the interior of the west is high, the fragmentation of northern and southern Jiangsu is high, while the fragmentation of mid-Jiangsu is low.(2)The degree of fragmentation of cultivated land in most area of southern Jiangsu and midJiangsu showed an upward trend, while the fragmentation of cultivated land in northern Jiangsu showed a downward trend from 1985 to 2008. The degree of agglomeration of cultivated land is weakened continuously, the area of high value agglomeration is decreasing and the trend of "polarization" is weakening.(3) Topographic condition is the decisive factor for the formation of the difference pattern. The change of rural residential land, cultivated land and the scale of urban land use plays a role on the cultivated land fragmentation index, among them, the change of rural residential land scale has the most significant effect on cultivated land fragmentation.
With the reform of agriculture, family farms have become hot spots in the reform of agricultural management system. Taking Rudong County of Jiangsu Province for an example, the land transfer performance of family farms was evalu- ated using the first hand data from field investigation by building an index system for comprehensive performance evaluation of family farm land transfer covering three dimensions of economy, society and ecology. The results show that land transfer in family farm mode has realized the scale management of land, enhanced the agri- cultural level of science and technology, effectively promoted the structural adjust- ment of agriculture and income increase of farmers, advanced the development of eco-agriculture, and achieved good economic and social performances. However, in the development process of family farms, inputs of agro-chemicals, fertilizers and other agro-products have brought about the eco-environmental problems, which are still worth noting.