Abstract:

The scale and the spatial structure of the settlement have always been the research focus of geography, and fractal theory is increasingly being applied to the quantitative research of settlement, however, the fractal study is inadequate in a certain aspect of the rural study which is compared with the fractal theory applied in urban system. Fractal study is one of the most important content in modern theoretical geography. This paper commenced with the application of the fractal theory and tried to compare the characteristics of the settlements system of the Southern of Jiangsu and the Northern of Anhui at the scale of the county area, by using the ArcGIS 93 software and the second national land survey data at the scale of 1〖DK〗∶10 000. Based on the fractal theory, the paper compared the scale structure and spatial structure of settlements system. According to the results, the paper drew the conclusions as follows.(1) The coefficient of determination of Danyang City and Yongqiao District fractal scale distribution were 0966 and 0962，and the correlation coefficient of the spatial structure was about 0.990, indicating that reunionlike settlements system in the Southern of Jiangsu and the Northern of Anhui are fractal in the scale structure and spatial structure of settlements system, acting as a selfsimilar structure. The settlement system in northern of Anhui was at a lower level of development. It showed that fractal theory was suitable for settlement system analysis and had a certain practical value of the settlement system planning.(2) The spatial aggregation of reunionlike settlements system in Southern of Jiangsu and the Northern of Auhui both acted as multilevel fractal character. The spatial aggregation CityTownCentre VillageNature Village in the Southern plain of Jiangsu was stronger than the Northern of Anhui; however the spatial aggregation TownCentre VillageNature Village and Centre VillageNature Village Settlement System in Southern plain of Jiangsu behaved in the opposite. The scaleless size reflected the low level of development of Settlement System of the Northern of Auhui.(3) The level of urbanization of the district was the most important factors which influenced the fractal characteristics of the settlement system in the plains. It suggets that the Northern of Auhui should optimize regional settlement scale and spatial structure by building urbanrural integration system.Therefore, in the future work, fractal theory would be a useful tool for the planning of settlements system, finally making effective use of geospatial resources and optimizing the structure of the settlement system in a specific area. And we need further study to identity whether the regional differences study is suitable to apply to other areas or not