Effective use of arable land to meet the growing demand for food requires rational land use management and planning. Land suitability evaluation (LSE) is an important step in this planning. The robustness of the LSE results should be evaluated for the effective implementation in land-use planning. Until now, sensitivity analysis has received only minimal attention especially lacks an insight into the spatial dimensions.

Researchers from Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a new framework that incorporates the spatial configuration information for sensitivity analysis, which combines the land suitability evaluation and the sensitivity analysis. 

The framework couples spatial visualization and summary indicators, which include a traditional metric (i.e., the mean of the absolute change rate, MACR) and a novel spatially explicit metric (the Earth Mover’s Distance, EMD). The weights of evaluation criteria were assumed as the only source of uncertainty and the newly reclaimed region of Yili in China was studied as the representative area. 

The result indicates that the LSE is robust according to the MACR, but local areas are relatively sensitive through the spatial visualization. Based on this framework, the MACR summarizes the information in the numerical value variations, whereas the EMD incorporates new information from the spatial variations for sensitivity analysis. All of these validate the effectiveness of this framework and demonstrate that it can provide a spatially explicit approach for the effective implementation of land use planning for the LSE. 

Related research results have been published in Applied Geography (Erqi Xu, Hongqi Zhang. Spatially explicit sensitivity analysis for land suitability evaluation. 2013.Applied Geography. 45: 1-9. DOI:10.1016/j.apgeog.2013.08.005.).