Abstract
Land consolidation is a key measure in the implementation of agricultural sustainability and has a strategic importance in farmland fragmentation reduction and rural revitalization. In order to understand spatiotemporal patterns of land consolidation implementation and their influences at a large scale, a comprehensive evaluation of 1046 land consolidation projects was conducted in Jiangsu Province, China. The results of this study showed that the construction scale (CS) and investment amount (IA) rose in waves in Jiangsu province during the period 2001–2017, while the newly increased farmland rate (NIFR) continued to decline. Spatial patterns of land consolidation aggregated, whereas the scale and the kernel density of the newly increased farmland area (NIFA) was differentiated in different time periods. In addition, the regional differentiation was significant. The gravity center of CS, IA, and NIFA moved with an overall trend from South Jiangsu to North Jiangsu, and finally stopped at the Li-Xia River plain area in North Jiangsu. The key factors that promoted land consolidation included natural farmland quality and the proportion of the primary industry production in GDP. The potential of NIFA, the farmland production amount, and the income of the financial transferring payment were also important factors. Spatial patterns were initially influenced by natural conditions and were later influenced more significantly by economic and policy conditions. In the future, differentiated land consolidation policy oriented by public involvement should be formulated to improve new frameworks of system implementation, as well as to provide evidence for spatial configuration, district cooperation, policy adjustment, and the systematic improvement of sustainable land consolidation.
Highlights
Since 1978, China’s industrialization and urbanization have developed rapidly, occupying a large percentage of high-quality farmland, coupled with inappropriate utilization
From the spatial patterns of land consolidation implementation in Jiangsu Province, the results showed the following: (1) The construction scale (CS) and investment amount (IA) of land consolidation showed an increasing trend in Jiangsu Province, China, whereas newly increased farmland rate (NIFR) demonstrated a decreasing trend
(2) The spatial pattern of land consolidation implementation in Jiangsu Province was in an aggregation distribution (NNI = 0.914985 < 1 with a significant p), whereas the spatial distribution was unbalanced and the regional differentiation was significant
Summary
Since 1978, China’s industrialization and urbanization have developed rapidly, occupying a large percentage of high-quality farmland, coupled with inappropriate utilization This has caused large-scale soil erosion, soil pollution, and land degradation, all of which seriously threaten food security and sustainable economic development [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Land consolidation, which is an effective measure of sustainable farmland management policy [12,13,14,15,16], had important functions to realize These were the requisition–compensation balance of farmland [10], the enhancement of farmland quality and grain production capacity [17,18,19,20], the safeguarding of national food safety [21,22], and the promotion of rural revitalization [23,24,25]
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