Comprehensive benefits evaluation and its spatial simulation for well‐facilitated farmland projects in the Huang‐Huai‐Hai Region of China

Abstract

AbstractThe establishment of well‐facilitated farmland in recent years has played a key role in addressing the issues of land fragmentation and food security in China. However, few researches focused on the spatially explicit simulation of comprehensive benefit levels (CBL) of well‐facilitated farmland projects in each 1 km × 1 km grid. Here, we analyzed the CBL of well‐facilitated farmland projects in the Huang‐Huai‐Hai Region (HHHR) of China during the 12th Five‐Year Plan period (2011–2015) using 568 questionnaires. Furthermore, we proposed a method based on a logistic regression model to analyze the CBL‐affecting factors and predicted the probability of high, middle, and low CBL in each 1 km × 1 km grid. The results showed that there were significant regional and interprovincial differences in the comprehensive benefits evaluation results. The projects with medium and high comprehensive benefits values were mainly located in southern Hebei Province, western Shandong Province, and southeastern Henan Province. The economic and social benefits of the projects in the plain areas contributed greatly to the increase in the comprehensive benefits of farmland. In contrast, the ecological benefits were greater for the projects in mountainous and hilly areas. The spatial prediction results indicated that 42.5% (22.5 million ha) of the HHHR, mainly distributed in plain areas, was predicted to have a high CBL with a probability of more than 0.5. Our findings are essential for governments to examine the construction benefit in this period, and the spatially predicted CBL probabilities can be used as a reference for well‐facilitated farmland layouts and future planning.