Historical Arable Land Change in an Eco-Fragile Area: A Case Study in Zhenlai County, Northeastern China

Yuanyuan Yang and Shuwen Zhang
Additional contact information
Yuanyuan Yang: Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Shuwen Zhang: Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130102, China

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 11, 1-20

Abstract: Long-term land changes are cumulatively a major driver of global environmental change. Historical land-cover/use change is important for assessing present landscape conditions and researching ecological environment issues, especially in eco-fragile areas. Arable land is one of the land types influenced by human agricultural activity, reflecting human effects on land-use and land-cover change. This paper selected Zhenlai County, which is part of the farming–pastoral zone of northern China, as the research region. As agricultural land transformation goes with the establishment of settlements, in this research, the historical progress of land transformation in agricultural areas was analyzed from the perspective of settlement evolution, and the historical reconstruction of arable land was established using settlement as the proxy between their inner relationships, which could be reflected by the farming radius. The results show the following. (1) There was little land transformation from nonagricultural areas into agricultural areas until the Qing government lifted the ban on cultivation and mass migration accelerated the process, which was most significant during 1907–1912; (2) The overall trend of land transformation in this region is from northeast to southwest; (3) Taking the topographic maps as references, the spatial distribution of the reconstructed arable land accounts for 47.79% of the maps. When this proxy-based reconstruction method is applied to other regions, its limitations should be noticed. It is important to explore the research of farming radius calculations based on regional characteristics. To achieve land-system sustainability, long-term historical land change trajectories and characteristics should be applied to future policy making.

Keywords: historical land-cover/use change; land reconstruction; arable land; farming radius; eco-fragile area; Northeast China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/11/3940/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/11/3940/ (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:jsusta:v:10:y:2018:i:11:p:3940-:d:179155

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

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