Abstract: In order to reveal the spatiotemporal evolution patterns and driving logic of rural settlements in typical mountainous and hilly areas under the background of rural revitalization, this study took the Gannan region as the research object. It comprehensively applied the landscape pattern index, average nearest neighbor analysis, binary Logistic regression model, and optimal parameter geographic detector (OPGD) to systematically analyze the spatial evolution characteristics of rural settlements and their multi-scale driving factors from 2000 to 2020. The results showed that from 2000 to 2020, the development of rural settlements presented a trend of evolution from dispersed micro-settlements to larger-scale settlements, forming a pattern where micro-settlements continuously shrank, small and medium-sized settlements remained relatively stable, and large settlements expanded significantly. Regarding dynamic changes, the overall development mode of rural settlements in the Gannan region tended to shift towards large settlements, with the development direction expanding from west to east. The area of high-aggregation regions continued to expand, and the morphological structure evolved towards irregularity. The driving mechanism mainly transitioned from being dominated by regional human-land relationships to being dominated by socio-economic backgrounds. The interactions among various driving factors were mainly manifested as nonlinear enhancement effects and two-factor synergistic enhancement effects. Among them, slope was the main factor affecting settlement distribution, while climate, transportation, and population density factors had significant interactive effects on the spatial evolution of settlements. This reflected that rural settlements in the Gannan region had obvious regional differentiation characteristics. It was necessary to implement a spatial governance strategy of "hierarchical classification and zonal guidance", strengthen the support of the transportation network, and promote the construction of terrain-adaptive settlements to optimize the rural settlement pattern and promote high-quality development in the Gannan region.

Key words: landscape pattern, rural settlements, spatial evolution, characteristics, driving factors, Gannan region