As a cross-disciplinary scientific domain, landscape geochemistry interacts with natural resources relevant subjects such as mineral exploration, agricultural production and land use planning with considerable environmental benefits, and provides substantially theoretical and applied supports to their utilization. Since its establishment, a great deal of research has been conducted. However, there are a few gaps that still remain. First, the current studies are only limited to characterizing the spatial distribution of chemical elements and exploring their mechanisms at landscape level and ignore the integrated analysis using multidisciplinary approaches. Moreover, the used methods lack the ability of revealing the relationships of landscape geochemistry with other sciences, and the obtained knowledge is thus fragmented and isolated, and its development has not been globally paid attention to. In this study, the state-of-the-art regarding the applications of relatively new geospatial technologies including fractal theory, geographic information system and remote sensing to landscape geochemistry was reviewed and analyzed to provide deep insights of current research and a roadmap for furthering the development of landscape geochemistry as a cross-disciplinary discipline. The results showed that substantial research on the applications of fractal theory, GIS and RS technologies for analyzing the processes and data of landscape geochemistry has been conducted by using the advantages of the geospatial technologies. However, the great challenges still exist when the geospatial technologies were individually utilized due to the limitations of the technologies themselves and the complexity of landscape geochemistry. In the end, opportunities and challenges for advancing the further studies of landscape geochemistry were discussed in detail and new directions of studying landscape geochemistry using multidisciplinary or integrated approaches to enhance understanding the relationships among the relevant disciplines were suggested.

Keywords: Landscape geochemistry; fractal theory; geographic information systems; remote sensing; environmental geochemistry; exploration geochemistry; multidisciplinary approach.

Huan Yu is thecommittee member of Digital Mountain Committee of International Society of Digital Earth,committee member of Mountain Resource Committee of China Society of Natural Resources andlifetime member of Chinese Society for Mineralogy, Petrology and Geochemistry.He received a doctorate in geographic information science and mainly focused on the landscape geochemistry study using geospatial techniques, remote sensing for ecological environment, and intelligent space-time simulation of surface landscape evolution.

As the project leader, he presided over 21 projects, such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the China Postdoctoral Science Fund, the National Ecological Environment Changes Monitoring by Remote Sensing, Sichuan Province Postdoctoral Research Project Special Fund and other national and provincial projects; As the first author, he published 47 papers in the "Journal Geographic Exploration", "Environmental Geochemistry and Health", "International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Applications", "The Scientific World Journal", "Journal of Image and Graphics", "Geoderma", "Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science", and other peer-reviewed publications indexed by SCI, EI, or CSCD.

Areas of interest: geographic information system, remote sensing, landscape geochemistry, ecological environment protection,sustainable development and utilization of natural resources.

Contact information:

College of Earth Sciences, Chengdu University of Technology

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Email：yuhuan0622@126.com