Evaluation of oasis land use security and sustainable utilization strategies in a typical watershed in the arid regions of China

Land supports the survival and development of humans. To safeguard the land use security of continental river watersheds in arid regions, the oasis of the Manas River Watershed was investigated using 15 evaluation indexes from three subsystems, including land use suitability, land use vulnerability and water security to provide a comprehensive evaluation based on the methods of analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy synthetic evaluation model, social economy and land use/cover data from remote sensing images for 1976, 1987, 1998 and 2010. The above-mentioned indexes were classified into four levels, which were regarded as security (v ₁), relative security (v ₂), security threshold (v ₃) and insecurity (v ₄). The results showed that land use securities of oasis in the Manas River Watershed were at the insecure level of v ₄, and that the synthetic graded values were 0.6150, 0.5772, 0.5617 and 0.5640, respectively. For the three subsystems, indexes of land use suitability were all at the security level of v ₁, and the indexes of land use vulnerability were at the levels of v ₁, v ₂, v ₄ and v ₄ in the 4 years investigated, respectively. Furthermore, indexes of water security in the 4 years were all classified as insecure levels. Ultimately, it is important to determine the leading factors that restrict land use security and then put forward corresponding solutions. The objects of this study were to achieve sustainable land use in the Manas River Watershed, as well as provide scientific references for evaluation of land use security in the continental river watershed of arid regions.