Fig 1.
Location and administrative divisions of the study area.
(a) Location of Inner Mongolia in China; (b) Administrative divisions of the Inner Mongolia. The basemap is form United States Geological Survey (https://apps.nationalmap.gov/services/), cartographic software: ESRI. ArcGIS.
Table 1.
Description of the data used in this study.
Table 2.
Impact factor.
Table 3.
Interaction types.
Fig 2.
Kernel density maps of rural settlements in Inner Mongolia in 1990–2020.
The basemap is form United States Geological Survey (https://apps.nationalmap.gov/services/), cartographic software: ESRI. ArcGIS and Adobe photoshop CC.
Table 4.
Moran’s index of rural settlements in Inner Mongolia.
Fig 3.
Change of urban population, rural population, and rural settlement land in Inner Mongolia during 1990–2020.
Fig 4.
Transition trends of the land use type at a decadal interval in four periods.
Note: 1: cultivated land, 2: forest land, 3: grassland, 4: water area, 5: construction land except rural settlement land, 6: rural settlement land, and 7: unused land.
Table 5.
Land use type transfer matrix.
Fig 5.
Influencing factors on rural settlement.
Note: (a) Inner Mongolia, (b) Eastern region of Inner Mongolia, (c) Central region of Inner Mongolia, and (d) Western region of Inner Mongolia. X1: DEM, X2: slope, X3: aspect, X4: distance to towns, X5: distance to roads, X6: distance to railway; X7: distance to hospitals, X8: distance to schools, X9: distance to water, X10: distance to cultivated land, X11: temperature, X12: precipitation, X13: Soil types, X14: vegetation types, X15: vegetation coverage, X16: per capital GDP, and X17: population density.
Fig 6.
Interaction of influencing factors on rural settlement.
Note: (a) Inner Mongolia, (b) Eastern region of Inner Mongolia, (c) Central region of Inner Mongolia, and (d) Western region of Inner Mongolia. X1: DEM, X2: slope, X3: aspect, X4: distance to towns, X5: distance to roads, X6: distance to railway; X7: distance to hospitals, X8: distance to schools, X9: distance to water, X10: distance to cultivated land, X11: temperature, X12: precipitation, X13: Soil types, X14: vegetation types, X15: vegetation coverage, X16: per capital GDP, and X17: population density. The yellow background denotes nonlinear enhancement, and the gray denotes bilinear enhancement.