Spatial evaluation and zoning strategy of land use elemental conflicts in heavy industrial zones: Evidence from central Liaoning province in northeast China

The matching imbalance of resource factors leads to land use elemental conflicts (LUECs), which has become the bottleneck restricting high-quality social and economic development. The heavy industrial zones (HIZ) have become the focus area of LUECs due to the high resource consumption. Taking the urban group of central Liaoning Province, the area of industrial revitalization in northeast China as a case study area, the study proposed a wavelet coherence approach to identifying the influencing indicators and indicators weight of LUECs for spatial evaluation. Two‒dimensional graph theory is used to cluster the evaluation results of LUECs at the plot scale, and controls the main indicators to put forward the zoning strategies of LUECs. The results showed that the main indicators affecting LUECs in the western part of the HIZ are mainly human indicators, while the fierce conflicts in the east mainly come from natural indicators. The zoning strategies of LUECs in the HIZ should prevent excessive energy consumption from increasing carbon emissions in intense conflicts zone and moderate conflicts zone, strengthen the rural settlement arrangement and soil erosion control in mild conflicts zone, and structure ecological security early warnings in potential conflicts zone. This study provides an important reference for land use conflicts in the global heavy industrial urban agglomeration.