Land use change and driving factors in rural China during the period 1995-2015

Yang Zhou, Xunhuan Li and Yansui Liu

Land Use Policy, 2020, vol. 99, issue C

Abstract: Land use/cover change (LUCC) is the result of interaction between human activities and biophysical processes. Extensive researches have been done on LUCC in urban China, but the understanding on rural land-use remains relatively inadequate. Based on land use, socio-economic, topographic and climate data from 1995–2015, taking China’s 31,275 townships as the research object, this study applied land-use dynamic degree (LUDD), geo-detector model and bivariate spatial autocorrelation analysis to explore the spatio-temporal pattern and driving factors of LUCC in rural China. Results show that over the past two decades, significant changes have taken place in the type and structure of land use in rural China. The cultivated land increased in northeast and northwest China, and the built-up area increased in Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region as well as Henan and Anhui provinces. More than 80 % of built-up land expansion came from the occupation of cultivated land. The Loess Plateau, Sichuan Basin, Hebei, Henan, western Xinjiang and southern Jiangsu have experienced the most serious decline in arable land. The driving force of LUCC varied greatly with space, time and land use type. Socio-economic development was the main driving force for the built area expansion, and geographical differentiation was the dominant factor in the conversion of cultivated land, forest land and grassland. The intensity of population and economic growth driving built-up land expansion decreases from east to west, while that of terrain-driven conversion of cultivated land into forest land gradually increases from west to east. These findings would provide decision support for policy-makers to formulation future sustainable land use policies. At the same time, it would help to further promote the exploration of China’s complicated human-land relationship.

Keywords: Land use/coverage change; Spatio-temporal pattern; Influencing factors; Land-use dynamic degree (LUDD); GeoDetector model; Rural China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837719323476
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:lauspo:v:99:y:2020:i:c:s0264837719323476

DOI: 10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.105048

Access Statistics for this article

Land Use Policy is currently edited by Jaap Zevenbergen

More articles in Land Use Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joice Jiang ().