The spatiotemporal variation of farmland use transition and its critical influential factors in coordinated urban-rural regions: A case of Chongqing in western China

Abstract

Farmland use transition (FUT) is indispensable to understand land use transition in urban-rural planning and development. Employing a complementary evaluation framework, this research contributes to a comprehensive understanding of urban-rural agriculture and forestry sustainability at the intra-urban scale through an in-depth examination of Chongqing, an urban-rural coexistence area in China’s inland, from 1980 to 2015. During the study period, a total of 2142.41 km2 farmland area were lost, of which 71.0 % were transited to built-up land, 18.7 % were transited to forests, 6.3 % were transited to grassland, and 4.0 % were transited to waters. The transition to built-up land, however, is uneven, with overwhelmingly 81.3 % happened in the one circle area (44.6 % were in the traditional urban core area), the northeast and southeast wings areas only account 12.8 % and 5.9 % of the transition. Since 2000, the recessive functions have been enhanced most in farmland productivity and multiple cropping, with 9.7 % annual increase of the former and 6.5 % annual increase of the latter. The two wings benefitted more in the functional enhancement. Both multiple linear regression and random forest show well goodness-of-fit and indicate prominent significance of rural employed population, the inadequately noted factor in previous studies, and GDP per sq.km in influencing area of farmland and construction intensity. Proximity of central city is also a significant variable though inferior to the former two. The rest variables are less important.