LAUSR

The land development by human beings has changed from the initial small-scale and low-level transformation to the comprehensive utilization of large-scale and high-intensity implementations. The contradiction between production-living-ecology space (PLES) has become increasingly prominent while drawing land dividends. As one of the important birthplaces of Chinese civilization and the ecological barrier in the northern region, the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the Yellow River Basin (YRB) make the ecological environment very fragile, and the imbalance of land and space development is extremely serious. Therefore, according to the multifunctional characteristics of land use, this paper establishes a classification system of production space (PS), living space (LS) and ecology space (ES), and discusses the spatiotemporal evolution and conflict distribution characteristics of the PLES with the help of the transfer matrix and spatial conflict index (SCI). The results are as follows. In 1990–2020, agricultural production space (APS), grassland ecology space (GES) and other ecology space (OES) yielded the largest proportion of PLES in the YRB. However, compared with 1990, the area of these spatial types decreased in 2020, while the urban living space (ULS) expanded rapidly. The distribution pattern of PLES was generally consistent, and the transformation between PLES in Ningxia, central Inner Mongolia, Loess Plateau and downstream areas was relatively intense. The conflict index of PLES showed an upward trend, but it was generally in a controllable range. The stable and controllable areas were concentrated in the upstream of the urban agglomeration, and the midstream and downstream were basic out of control and seriously out of control, respectively.