A stage of cultivated land use towards sustainable intensification in China: Description and identification on anti-intensification

Abstract

There is an anti-intensification phenomenon in China's economically developed areas with highly intensive cultivated land use. Deconstructing characteristics and trends of anti-intensification will help achieve sustainable production that maximizes social and economic benefits. This paper constructs an anti-intensification cultivated land use (ACLU) evaluation system to measure the ACLU state and mechanism on multiple spatial scales. Jiangsu Province in China, with a developed economy, is used as a case area to discuss ACLU's changing trends and characteristics from 2000 to 2015. Results show that Jiangsu's ACLU at the macro-regional level manifested in the input intensity has gradually slowed down. Meanwhile, the utilization level has shown a significant downward trend, and the output dimension has a negative feedback effect. At the micro-patch level of 1 km, within the 90% confidence interval, around 47.12% of the cultivated land showed an anti-intensification downward trend, and approximately 22.03% of the cultivated land showed an anti-intensification upward trend. Generally, ACLU has strong spatial agglomeration and scale attenuation law, and small scale can better reflect its changes and development trends. Besides, ACLU influencing factors show differences in different locations, regions, and scales, which may be closely related to the ACLU's complex driving mechanism oriented by man-land relationships evolution. Identifying anti-intensification phenomena and characteristics can provide new ideas for differentiated cultivated land protection, construction, and restoration measures.