Abstract
Cropland abandonment (CRA) is an extreme case of cropland marginalization. With the continuous development of global industrialization and urbanization, the phenomenon of CRA gradually spreads from developed countries such as eastern and western European countries and the United States to developing countries such as China, especially in regions with poor geographical conditions such as mountainous areas. However, research on CRA in developing countries is sparse, and adequate identification methods and spatial distribution information are lacking in China, impeding the comprehensive understanding of the status quo of CRA as well as the formulation of related policies and measures. Therefore, taking Wushan County in Chongqing as an example, we developed a CRA extraction method to identify cropland. Landsat 8 OLI_TIRS remote sensing images were adopted in the extraction. Subsequently, Google Earth images were used to verify the extraction results, and the extraction accuracy of abandoned cropland plaques reached 89.33%. The CRA rate in Wushan between 2011 and 2016 was 28.71%, and abandoned cropland was highly scattered across the region. In areas above 800 m and with slopes of more than 15°, large areas were abandoned. However, an increasing irrigation radius resulted in higher labor costs and, ultimately, larger abandoned areas. Using the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects-Small (CLUE-S) model, the CRA status under different scenarios was simulated, and under the scenario of economic development, the CRA rate in the next 20 years was as low as 28.84%, while under the scenario of natural growth, the rate reached 33.54%. When the model used the scenario of ecological protection, the cropland area in Wushan County decreased significantly, and the CRA rate reached 42.11%.
Highlights
Cropland abandonment (CRA) is an extreme phenomenon of cropland marginalization [1,2,3]
From 2011 to 2016, the CRA rate in Wushan County of Chongqing reached 28.71%, and abandoned cropland was highly scattered throughout the region
According to the preliminary analysis on those driving factors; elevation, slope, and irrigation radius were significantly correlated with the CRA rate, while the distance to the road only played a minor role
Summary
Cropland abandonment (CRA) is an extreme phenomenon of cropland marginalization [1,2,3]. CRA has first been found in Europe mountainous areas in the early 20th century [4,5,6]. According to the spatial resolution of satellite images, moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) data (250 m) and Landsat TM images (30 m) are the two main data sources utilized to identify abandoned cropland. Alcantara et al [10] acquired CRA information for eastern Europe between 2003 and 2008, using a combination of time series and phenological information extracted from MODIS data. Using Landsat TM images, He et al [11] investigated the CRA in some regions of Russia and Georgia during 2003–2008 by a time division method while Baumann et al [12] identified the abandoned cropland of western Ukraine between 1986 and 2008 via the support vector machine (SVM) classification method
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