Abstract: Greenway construction plays very important roles in improving urban form and protecting its ecological environment, being one of the hot points in ecological research. However, for most places in China, the present greenway’s planning methods cannot be popularized due to the defect of excessive subjectivity and the shortage of scientificity and rationality. In this paper, suitability analysis was adopted to study the urban greenway network design, taking the Great West River Pilot Area in Changsha City as the object and under the support of GIS. The suitability analysis includes five steps, i.e., 1) selection of evaluation factors and determination of evaluation criteria, 2) calculation of the factors weights, 3) assessment of site suitability, 4) assessment of accessibility, and 5) delineation of greenway networks. The Pilot Area is located in the west side of Changsha City, as a “Two-Oriented Society” (resource-conserving and environment-friendly society) demonstration area of the Changsha-Zhuzhou-Xiangtan Urban Agglomeration. The results showed that the greenway network design with the combination of GIS and suitability analysis could be used as a design method for greenway network construction in the future, due to its less demand on related data, simplified operation, scientific evaluation process, and well-defined results. Three greenway networks with integrated functions and their own characteristics in the Pilot Area were designed, which could improve the urban form of the Area and its environmental quality, and provide a reference for the greenway project design in similar regions of China in the future.

Key words: Pangquangou Nature Reserve, taxonomic diversity, plant community, environmental factor, correlation.