Abstract
Chongqing municipality, the main study area of this paper, is a mountainous city in Southwest China, where massive rural populations migrated to cities and towns in recent years. This study extracted abandoned farmland figure spots from farmland distribution maps of 2002 and 2011 on a 1:10,000 scale. Further, this research analyzed the spatial distribution characteristics of farmland abandonment and its influencing factors at the parcel level from 2002 to 2011. The main influencing factors of farmland abandonment include distance of a parcel to the closest settlement, difference between the parcel elevation and the average elevation of the whole village settlement, parcel slope, and parcel size. The former three factors are positively correlated with farmland abandonment rate, and parcel size is negatively correlated. That is to say that larger commuting distance, elevation difference, and parcel slope increase the abandonment probability; and a larger parcel size can reduce the risk of abandonment.
Highlights
Farmland abandonment refers to the phenomenon of cultivated land remaining unused and idle for more than one year [1]
Zhang analyzed multi-scale impact factors of farmland abandonment through a multi-level regression model, and the results revealed that at the parcel level, the explanatory power of impact factors in the spatial distribution of farmland abandonment is as high as 80%, 7% at household level and 13% at village level [33]
When tillage distance is within the range of 400 m, the abandonment rate is less than 20%; when tillage distance is greater than 600 m, the abandonment rate is above 30%; when tillage distance is greater than 900 m, more than 40% of the farmland is abandoned
Summary
Farmland abandonment refers to the phenomenon of cultivated land remaining unused and idle for more than one year [1]. During the second half of the 20th century, the global mountain population continued to decrease, and the vast land abandonment phenomenon occurred [8,9]. In such areas as the Mediterranean region, North America, Europe, and Japan, events such as farmland abandonment, the increase of forest areas, and the discontinuation of marginal farmland production [10,11,12,13] can be considered as typical in cases of farmland marginalization [14,15,16,17,18,19]. In Europe, Japan, and other developed countries and regions [18,21,22], the development of urbanization and industrialization caused the rural population to move out, and non-agriculturalization resulted in a large reduction in agricultural labor in mountainous regions
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