Environmental Impact Assessment of Land Use Planning in Wuhan City Based on Ecological Suitability Analysis

Chinese Law of Environmental Impact Assessment obligates the environmental impact assessment on land use planning. It will have a direct impact on regional land use patterns, and then affect the regional eco-environmental quality. Currently, the researches on theories and methodologies for environmental impact assessment of land use planning are hotspots in the fields of plan environmental impact assessment. With the support of ENVI 4.2, the remote sensing images of Wuhan City are interpreted, and then landforms, such as rivers, lakes and built-up areas, etc., are extracted. The digital elevation model is built on the 1:250000 topographic maps, then the terrain factors, e.g., slope, elevation, are extracted. With the support of spatial analysis module in ArcGIS 9.2, the comprehensive evaluation for urban industrial land ecological suitability are obtained based on the factor overlay analysis. The proportion of suitable, basically suitable and not suitable for land use is 20%, 28% and 52%, respectively. Finally, the land use planning is evaluated with indicators based on the ecological suitability analysis. The results showed that the layout for industrial land in Wuhan Urban Master Plan (1996-2020) is basically rational, and consistence with the conclusions derived from the ecological suitability analysis. The study attempts to provide reference for the methodology of plan environmental impact assessment.