Cultivated Land Fragmentation and Its Influencing Factors Detection: A Case Study in Huaihe River Basin, China.

Jiale Liang,Ting Zhou,Jiangfeng Li,Sipei Pan,Wanxu Chen

doi:10.3390/ijerph19010138

Abstract

The booming population and accelerating urbanization in the Huaihe River Basin have sped up the land use transformation and the cultivated land fragmentation (CLF), seriously impeded the advancement of agricultural modernization, and threatened regional stability and national food security as well. The analysis of CLF degree and its spatiotemporal distribution characteristics, along with the influencing factors in the Huaihe River Basin, is of great significance for promoting the intensive and efficient utilization of cultivated land resources and maintaining food security. Previous studies lack the measurement and cause analysis of CLF in Huaihe River Basin. To bridge the gap, this study introduces Fragstats4.2 and ArcGIS10.3 to analyze the spatiotemporal characteristics of CLF in county units in the Huaihe River Basin from 2000 to 2018 through the Lorentz curve, entropy method, and spatial auto-correlation method while the causes of the spatiotemporal differentiation of CLF in the basin were explored with the help of a geographic detector. The results show that the spatial distribution of cultivated land in the Huaihe River Basin is relatively balanced, and the Gini coefficients of cultivated land from 2000 to 2018 were 0.105, 0.108, and 0.113, respectively. More than 56% of the counties in the basin have a location entropy greater than 1. the percentage of landscape, area-weighted mean patch area, patch cohesion index, and aggregation index decrease year by year while the patch density and splitting index show an upward trend. The landscape pattern of cultivated land is highly complex, and the overall fragmentation degree is increasing. The county distribution pattern of the CLF degree with random and agglomeration is generally stable. The spatiotemporal differentiation of CLF in the Huaihe River Basin is affected by multiple factors, among which the influences of the normalized difference vegetation index, per capita cultivated land area, and intensity of human activity obviously stronger than other factors, and the contribution rate of the factors reached more than 0.4. The interaction effect among the factors is stronger than that of single factor, with dual-factor enhancement and nonlinear enhancement dominating. The results of this study have important implications for optimizing the agricultural structure in the Huaihe River Basin and alleviating the CLF in important grain production areas.

Highlights

Introduction distributed under the terms andServing as the fundamental resource for human survival and society development [1], cultivated land performs multiple functions, such as production and living, and plays an important role in maintaining ecological security and food security and promoting social and economic stability [2,3]
The results showed that the Lorentz curve of cultivated land in the Huaihe River Basin was close to the absolute average line from 2000 to 2018, and the variation range was small, indicating that the spatial distribution of cultivated land resources in the basin was relatively scattered during the study period
It can be observed in this study that the spatial distribution of cultivated land resources in the Huaihe River Basin was relatively uniform, the Gini coefficient of cultivated land increased year by year, and the degree of cultivated land specialization was high, which is similar to the results obtained by Liu et al based on normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the transfer matrix method [49]

Summary

Introduction

Serving as the fundamental resource for human survival and society development [1], cultivated land performs multiple functions, such as production and living, and plays an important role in maintaining ecological security and food security and promoting social and economic stability [2,3]. Since the 21st century, the disordered expansion of conditions of the Creative Commons.

Objectives

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion