Abstract: In the present study, the quality of cultivated land and protection zoning in Guixi City were studied by multi-factor comprehensive evaluation and local spatial autocorrelation analysis (LISA). It was shown that the comprehensive quality value of cultivated land in Guixi City varied from 39.08 to 89.88, reaching moderate and upper levels generally. The high-quality cultivated land was located in the central valley plain area. The positive spatial autocorrelation of cultivated land quality which contained the High-High type (HH) and the Low-Low type (LL) emerged as cluster and had a powerful agglomeration, while the negative spatial autocorrelation which included the High-Low type (HL) and Low-High type (LH) barely had a concentrate region, and most of them distributed dispersedly with barely outstanding regular pattern. According to the spatial agglomerate characteristics of natural quality of cultivated land in Guixi City, the protection zone of cultivated land was divided into 4 sub-regions, which included the key type, the suitable type, the regulation type and the backup type, and protection measures were put forwarded according to the sub-region schemes.

Key words: cultivated land quality, local spatial autocorrelation, protection zoning of cultivated land