Land Use Change in the Major Bays Along the Coast of the South China Sea in Southeast Asia from 1988 to 2018

Junjue Zhang and Fenzhen Su
Additional contact information
Junjue Zhang: State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China
Fenzhen Su: State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China

Land, 2020, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-19

Abstract: Bays are some of the core areas for marine economic development. The South China Sea coast is one of the most developed and dynamic places in the Asia-Pacific. In this study, we focused on the large bays surrounding the South China Sea. The techniques of image segmentation and supervised classification as well as image interpretation were used to acquire land-use data of 41 bays from 1988 to 2018. Then, we quantified the intensity and pattern of land-use and land-cover change during the two periods. Plantation land was the dominant agriculture land type as well as the second land use type after natural forest. Agriculture land cover increased from 29.8% to 40.9% and the growth was driven by plantation expansion. Deforestation was serious, including both natural forests and mangroves. Natural forest cover decreased by 31.6% and mangrove cover decreased by 16.2%. The vast majority of forest loss occurred in Sumatra and western Kalimantan. Commodity-driven deforestation for plantations was the major reason for forest loss.

Keywords: bay; land-use and land-cover change; South China Sea; forest (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/9/1/30/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/9/1/30/ (text/html)

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:gam:jlands:v:9:y:2020:i:1:p:30-:d:310812

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().