Analysis of Farmland Abandonment at Parcel Level: A Case Study in the Mountainous Area of China

Tiechou Shi, Xiubin Li, Liangjie Xin and Xiaohong Xu
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Tiechou Shi: Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100101, China
Xiubin Li: Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100101, China
Liangjie Xin: Key Laboratory of Land Surface Pattern and Simulation, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100101, China
Xiaohong Xu: Department of Business Administration, Hebei College of Industry and Technology, Shijiazhuang 050091, China

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 10, 1-19

Abstract: Chongqing municipality, the main study area of this paper, is a mountainous city in Southwest China, where massive rural populations migrated to cities and towns in recent years. This study extracted abandoned farmland figure spots from farmland distribution maps of 2002 and 2011 on a 1:10,000 scale. Further, this research analyzed the spatial distribution characteristics of farmland abandonment and its influencing factors at the parcel level from 2002 to 2011. The main influencing factors of farmland abandonment include distance of a parcel to the closest settlement, difference between the parcel elevation and the average elevation of the whole village settlement, parcel slope, and parcel size. The former three factors are positively correlated with farmland abandonment rate, and parcel size is negatively correlated. That is to say that larger commuting distance, elevation difference, and parcel slope increase the abandonment probability; and a larger parcel size can reduce the risk of abandonment.

Keywords: parcel level; farmland abandonment; influencing factors; abandonment rate; Chongqing mountainous area (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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