Abstract: Under the background of the new urbanization and ecological civilization construction, urban development is an urgent need to layout properly to achieve the economical and intensive use of urban space, reducing the impact of the waste of land resources and ecological destruction due to disorderly expansion of construction land in the process of urbanization. In this paper, the area of Wujin District, Changzhou City was taken as an example to conduct a case study. A system of resistance assignment was established from four aspects including landforms and landscape conditions, ecological environment quality, transport facilities layout, and building density. To consider the vertical ecological processes, we used spatial analysis to obtain the resistance datum of the ecological protection land expansion and urban land expansion based on the integrated multi-factor multivariate discriminant model, and then with a minimum cumulative resistance model adopted respectively to describe the ecological sustainability of the horizontal ecological processes. Then, based on the minimum cumulative resistance difference threshold between the two expansion process surface, the urban land ecological suitability of Wujin District was classified into four zones as ecological control zone, ecological buffer zone, suitable construction zone, priority construction zone with areas of 115.90 km², 777.91 km², 233.60 km², and 118.39 km², respectively. We demonstrated the spatial layout of the four partitions, and proposed corresponding development strategies. Priority construction zone could priority as urbanization development areas, in order to achieve the highest efficiency in the use of land; suitable construction zone could be a supplement to the priority construction zone, while playing back-up resources by focusing on the development potential of land consolidation area; ecological buffer zone should be maintained rivers, woodlands and other high-quality agricultural and ecological landscape types, so as to play a role of important ecological functions; ecological control zone should control the urbanization construction and development activities, maintaining and controlling the ecological security baseline of Wujin District. All these suggestions provide scientific and rational spatial layout reference for future urban development in Wujin District. The traditional methods normally only considered a single one from the ecological sustainability of the horizontal process or vertical ecological process, the integrated method developed in this study offers beneficial attempt and supplement for division of urban land ecological suitability zoning.

Key words: urban land ecological suitability, vertical ecological processes, hovizontal ecological processes, minimum cumulative resistance model, Wujin District