River basin is an important landscape ecology and recreation-scape construction region. Recreation-scape ecological evaluation and planning are the key points for rationally utilizing river basin natural and human resources, establishing coordinated landscape system and promoting sustainable development. The Kunes is a branch of Yili River in Xinjiang, which is topographically characteristized by mountains, grassland and valley with beautiful sceneries for recreational purpose. This paper, taking landscape space of the Kunes river basin as a base, studies the suitability characteristics of the recreation-scape of the basin. Landscapes in the Kunes river basin mainly consist of broadness landscape, which occupies 38.5% of the total basin's area, the concealment landscape, which is 16.3% of the total area and transitional zone between the two types of landscapes, which is 45.2%. The evaluation of the recreation-scape suitability was carried out on seven landscape areas and 31 kinds of behaviors. The suitability of stockbreeding is 27.94%, particularly suiting plain grassland with a suitability of 62.6% and mountain grassland with a suitability of 60%.
The suitability of manufacturing and processing industry as a whole is low, being only 4.13%, and with a relatively high suitability of 22.2% in small towns, but unsuitable to the other six types of landscapes. The suitability of the infrastructure construction is relatively low, being 9.92% owing to its great limitations. The suitability of towns and villages is better, being 61.1%. The social public activities are the unique human landscape of minority nationalities with a high suitability 27.8% of the total landscape. The suitability of recreation-scape behaviors is 22.59%, a moderate one with limitations to landscape. From the viewpoint of sustainable landscape resources utilization, recreational behaviors are most suitable to landscape of towns and villages, plain grassland and mountain grassland, and other landscapes are less or unsuitable to visitors, which should be conserved originally.