The Trend of GIS-Based Suitable Planting Areas for Chinese Soybean Under the Future Climate Scenario

Abstract

In this study, it gets the distribution of suitable planting areas for soybean by taking the soybean, one of the Chinese major food crops, as the object of study, adopting the multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) method, combining the climate, soil and crop growing conditions, and making use of the geographical information system (GIS) technology. The time zone for future climate chosen in this study is between 2071 and 2100. This chapter gets the distribution of suitable planting areas for soybean in the future presuming that the sunlight, soil, topography, and other factors are the same as those between 1971 and 2000 while the precipitation (PRE) and temperature change. In addition, it has compared it with the suitable planting areas at present. The results show that under the future climate conditions, the most suitable planting areas for spring soybean mainly concentrate in Inner Mongolia near to Jilin as well as the southeast of Gansu and southern Ningxia. Compared with the former suitable planting areas, the overall most suitable planting areas for spring soybean is moving to northwest. Under the future climate conditions, the total suitable planting area for Chinese spring soybean is 5,957,960 km2, taking 79.35 % of the total area. Under the future climate conditions, the most suitable planting area for summer soybean mainly concentrate in western Jilin, western Liaoning, part of Hebei, Beijing, eastern Shandong, southern Jiangsu, Zhejiang, central of Fujian, part of Anhui, southern Hunan, northern Guangxi, southeast of Guizhou, Chongqing, Hubei, and part of Shanxi. The most suitable planting areas for summer soybean are scattered without obvious regularity and extend to Liaoning, Jilin, and northern Hebei to the north and to Shandong peninsula to the east and to the Yangtze River region to the south. The total suitable planting area of summer soybean is 6,118,013 km2 taking 81.47 % of the total.