Since land and labor force are primary resources to be used and controlled by rural households, the allocation of labor forces will influence land uses, and further lead to land use conversion. The present study used the Binary Logit model to investigate the influence of labor force transfer, characteristics of rural households, location, and land market on agricultural land use conversion at rural household level. This study was conducted based on 329 valid questionnaires, which were obtained in Changshu, Rudong, and Tongshan counties, respectively representing the southern, middle and northern areas of Jiangsu Province. The results showed that land market participation, location, zonal difference and labor transfer had strong influences on agricultural land use conversion. The participation of land market had a strong positive effect on land use conversion, especially for the farmland converted to the fishpond. The nearer to the county seat, the more conversion of land use occurred. Particularly, the labor force transfer caused by wage employment decreased this conversion probability, while the labor transfer caused by self-employment led to more conversion; and the increasing of income from labor transfer increased the conversion. Moreover, land use con- versions demonstrated zonal difference, which were more in Rudong and Changshu counties than in Tongshan County, and the factors influencing this conversion were different in the three regions.
Land use change has significant influence on the operation of the PopulationResources-Environment-De-velopment (PRED) System. Moderate land use is the key factor to ensure the coordinative and sustainable development between land use and PRED system. Based on the internal relationship between land use and PRED system, a PRED evaluation index system and a Press-Status-Response (PSR) model were established in this study. According to the expounding on the mechanism of the PSR model, we investigated the coordinative development between the changes of regional land use and PRED system taking Jiangsu Province as an example. The results showed that the orders of the Synthetic Index of Land Use (SILU) and the Variation of PRED Index (VPI) in Jiangsu are both the southern Jiangsu>the central Jiangsu>the northern Jiangsu. A cubic curve model was used to fit the relationship between the VPI and SILU. The inflection point of VPI was situated in 5.0 of SILU. When SILU was below 5.0, VPI increased with SILU, which will be helpful to the coordinative development between land use and PRED system. Based on those results, it is suggested that the land use degree of the southern Jiangsu, especially that of Nanjing City, should be moderately controlled at present, while land resources of the central Jiangsu and the northern Jiangsu should be further exploited.
