Land cover changes during agrarian restructuring in Northeast China

Abstract

During the last quarter of the 20th century the agrarian sector in China went through a series of reforms. Changes in government policy on land use led to extensive changes in land cover, culminating in the 1990s. These changes were detected from multi-temporal Landsat TM images of 1990, 1995 and 2000 for Northeast China. Overlay of the mapped land cover in ArcInfo showed that farmland and grassland decreased while water, built-up areas, and woodland increased. More than three-quarters of the detected changes occurred during 1990–1995. Farmland changed mainly to woodland, water, and built-up areas while woodland and grassland were converted chiefly to farmland. Spatially, the change from woodland to farmland adjoined the margin of natural forests while change in the opposite direction was restricted to the agropastoral west. Paradoxically, reclamation of grassland to farmland also took place in the agropastoral west. These conflicting changes were caused primarily by lack of stability and consistency in the government's land use policies.