Response of landscape dynamics to socio-economic development and biophysical setting across the farming-pastoral ecotone of northern China and its implications for regional sustainable land management

Abstract

The farming-pastoral ecotone, one of the most sensitive eco-climatic zones worldwide, is suffering from the impacts of rapid socio-economic development and climate change. However, there is still only limited knowledge of how the land system responded to these large changes. Therefore, this study selected the farming-pastoral ecotone of northern China (FPEN) as a typical study area, and tried to use long-term (1980 s-2015) land use data, socio-economic data and climatic data to investigate the landscape dynamics in response to socio-economic development and biophysical setting. Results showed that the entire FPEN experienced three divergent stages, i.e., strong land development/reclamation (before 2000), then land restoration (2000–2010), and finally land use optimization management (after 2010) in the past four decades. In the stage of land reclamation, the croplands of FPEN went through a rapid expansion and reached the maximum area in 2000 with 2.41 × 105 km2. Meanwhile, the entire study area's cropland gravity center had the highest spatial shift rate by ∼3.0 km/a, compared to the averaged ratio for the entire period (1.38 km/a) and those in the other two periods. The most fragmentized landscape patterns were also observed in this stage. In the second stage, large areas of sloped croplands were converted into ecological land (i.e., forests and grasslands). Its landscape complexity and spatial aggregation peaked the whole research period at 84.07 km and 3.82 km. Land consolidation and cropland intensification based on land engineering are the main characteristics in the current third stage of land use optimization management. The analyses based on geographical detector software (a tool for measuring of spatial stratified heterogeneity and attributing of spatial patterns) indicated that per capita GDP and elevation-dependent factor were the top two indictors in determining landscape dynamics at present. Besides, the findings of this study suggest that more efforts could focus on balancing the ecology and livelihoods in future sustainable land-use management.