Increasingly strengthened impact and pressure of population growth on land for nature (LN) seriously interferes with ecological balance. Clarifying the relationship between population increase and LN, either conflict or coordination, is of great significance to regional sustainable development. Although a large number of previous studies have explored the relationship between socioeconomic system and natural system, the interactive stress relationships between population and LN have not been revealed from the coupling perspective. To be specific, this study used coupling coordination model and decoupling model to analyze the relationship between population density and LN at prefecture-level city level in China from 2000 to 2020 based on statistical data and remote sensing data. We found that the increase of China’s population density was accompanied with an evident decrease in LN. During the study period, the coupling coordination degree of population density and LN gradually increased, which indicated that man-land conflicts had eased. The results of decoupling analysis showed that strong decoupling type was the main relationship type and weak negative decoupling relationship type increased evidently. Our study provided a method to analyze the relationship between population density and LN from the perspective of coupling in other similar regions.
Zhou et al. (Thu,) studied this question.