Towns serve as the basic unit of implementation for comprehensive land consolidation and rehabilitation. The utilization of scaling law can provide a new perspective for construction land consolidation. From two perspectives of the town hierarchic system and the growth of a single town, this research applies the Rank-Size Rule and Allometric Scaling Law to analyze the scale structure, hierarchy and allometric scaling evolution relationship of population and construction land in the Loess Plateau at the town scale in 2000, 2010, and 2017. Furthermore, the consolidation potential of construction land is divided into five zones and puts forward recommendations for the comprehensive consolidation of the construction land. The results indicate: (1) The majority of towns have small or medium populations and 62% of the towns in the study show negative population growth. Geographically, the northern part has a smaller population size compared with the southern part. 96% of the towns show an increasing trend in the quantity of construction land, and the south and north parts of the study area have more construction land compared with the center part. The zone of the Valley Plain has the largest population size, and the zone of the Sandy and Desert Area has the largest quantity of construction land. (2) The rank-size distributions of both population and construction land comply with the power-law relation. The population hierarchy has changed from equilibrium to concentration, while the hierarchy of construction land shows an opposite pattern. So, the whole town hierarchic system of the Loess Plateau is gradually tending to the optimal distribution, which is the town hierarchic system gradually forming an ideal sequence structure. (3) The population-construction land relationship obeys the allometric scaling law, and the major allometric type is positive allometry. The human–land relationship tends to be coordinated, and the town system tends to be reasonable. The allometric scaling coefficient is not robust in different geographical areas, especially in Irrigated Agricultural Areas. Furthermore, 90% of the towns have weak coordination of human–land relationships, and 60% of the towns have a relatively faster growth rate of construction land than the relative growth (decline) rate of population. (4) The consolidation potential of construction land is divided into five types. High Consolidation Potential Area concentrates in the Eastern Loess Plateau, while Medium and Low Consolidation Potential Area concentrically distribute in the Western Loess Plateau. The Human–land Coordination Area has a small number and scattered spatial distribution. The land use of towns that are concentrated around prefecture-level cities or with unique resources is not intensive enough. The zoning of construction land consolidation potential based on the results of the allometric scale is in line with reality, and local governments should make use of the characteristics and trends of the town system to formulate planning schemes to promote the integrated development of urban and rural areas.

Linear cultural heritage—a heritage system spanning time and space—is a large-scale cultural settlement that accommodates various heritage types. Here, we comprehensively explored the Straight Road (Zhidao) of the Qin Dynasty in Shaanxi Province, China, as a gene of traditional cultural connotations and geographical features, and provided holistic conservation strategies and effective utilization paths. From an ecological security pattern perspective, 4399.89 km2 of ecological sources and 19 ecological nodes were identified based on the importance of four ecosystem services—carbon sequestration and oxygen release, water conservation, habitat maintenance, and soil retention. Then, 45 ecological corridors with a total length of 2938.49 km were determined using the minimum cumulative resistance model. The intersections of ecological corridors were distinguished and the key areas of cultural landscape construction were extracted by taking into account the spatial distribution of existing relics as well as the spatial network relationship of prohibited-development areas and existing gray corridors (roads), blue corridors (rivers), and green ecological corridors (shade zones, green belts, recreational greenways). A plan was proposed to construct 98.45 km2 of new parks (country parks: 28.38 km2, forest parks: 70.07 km2) and 101.26 km of new landscape corridors (urban type: 32.08 km, countryside type: 26.49 km, ecological type: 42.69 km). Multilevel landscape complexes should be built to form a functional and networked ecological–cultural spatial structure system. Findings of this study could provide ecological ideas for promoting the reservation and active utilization of linear cultural-heritage corridors on a regional scale.

The optimal allocation of educational resources has been a hot issue, and exploring the accessibility of educational facilities in poor mountainous areas helps to reasonably plan the layout of educational facilities and promote the balanced development of education. Taking the rocky desertification area in Yunnan, Guangxi, and Guizhou (YGGRD) as the study area, based on the POI data of educational facilities in the YGGRD in 2000, 2010 and 2019, this study explored the evolution of the accessibility of educational facilities in the YGGRD through raster accessibility. And the influencing factors were analyzed by the ordinary least square method (OLS) and geographically weighted regression model (GWR), and evaluated the model through cross validation. The results show that the overall accessibility of educational facilities improved significantly from 2000 to 2019. Educational facilities mainly have good accessibility and average accessibility. Poor accessibility areas are concentrated in the interprovincial border regions, and the boundary effect is significant. County accessibility, population density and rural per capita disposable income have a great impact on the accessibility of educational facilities in the YGGRD. It is suggested to strengthen the construction of educational facilities in the interprovincial border regions, relocate and integrate villages, and improve the education quality of township schools to improve the supply of rural educational resources.