Adaptive Management of Cultivated Land Use Zoning Based on Land Types Classification: A Case Study of Henan Province

Yanan Liu,Kening Wu,Xiaoliang Li,Hailong Cao,Xiao Li

doi:10.3390/land11030346

Abstract

Cultivated land serves as an important resource to ensure national food security, and how to allocate cultivated land reasonably and sustainably is an urgent problem that needs to be solved at present. Therefore, identifying land cultivability from the basic attributes of land and carrying out adaptive management measures in different zones is an effective way. Taking Henan province as a case study area, we proposed a research scheme for the adaptive management of cultivated land use zoning based on land types. First, a three-level land types classification system at the provincial level was established from five aspects—climate, topography, geology, soil properties, and hydrological conditions—and then Henan was divided into 39 first-level units, 4358 second-level units, and 6446 third-level units. On this basis, the changes in the status of land use in Henan province from 2009 to 2018 were analyzed from the four aspects of cultivated land utilization, population, grain yield, and GDP. The amount of cultivated land decreased, while the economy grew, the population increased, and grain yield increased, indicating that it is urgent to pay attention to the problem of cultivated land, and it is necessary to identify the potential space of cultivated land and manage and protect it reasonably. Based on the land types, evaluation of cultivability was carried out, the results showed that the degree of cultivability from high to low presented a transitional spatial distribution state from the east and the south to the middle, the north, and the west. Then superimposing the status of land use, six types of protection and management zones were proposed, and management suggestions were adaptively analyzed. The ideas and methods proposed in this study can be adapted to manage and utilize cultivated land from the perspective of sustainable utilization, which is of great significance for ensuring food security.

Highlights

Compared with the second survey in 2009, the cultivated land area has been reduced by 113 million mu, while the per capita cultivated land resource area is only 1.36 mu, which is less than half of the world average, and the cultivated land area is decreasing year by year [8,9]
According to the land types classification system at the provincial level, the climatic zones and first-level landform types were superimposed and intersected, and the first-level units were obtained by merging the same attribute patches
Among the first-level units, the uplift/erosion flow low-altitude plain in the northern subtropical humid region (C041T11130) accounts for the largest area ratio of Henan (36.44%), followed by the uplift/erosion flow low-altitude plain in the warm temperate semi-humid region (C032T11130), which accounts for 16.35% of the area ratio of Henan; these two occupy more than half of the Henan, with rich distribution and high complexity

Summary

Introduction

Cultivated land, as a material basis for human survival and development, is the key to solving food security issues. According to the report “The State of the World’s Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture in 2021”, more than 95% of the food produced in the world comes from land resources, but there is very little high-yield cultivated land available for further development [1]. Since the implementation of China’s reform and opening-up policy, population growth, industrialization, urbanization, and the impact of globalization have intensified the contradiction between humans and land resources, and the decline in the quantity and quality of cultivated land has seriously threatened the national food security and the harmonious development of human society [6,7]. The Central Economic Work Conference in December 2020 pointed out the need to resolutely curb the phenomenon of “non-agriculturalization” and “non-grain production” and standardize the balance of cultivated land between occupation and compensation.

Results

Discussion

Conclusion