Abstract:
Cultivated land use stability is of great significance for the national food security, economic and ecological balance, especially in the context of the land degradation. Therefore, an emphasis has also been put on the multifaceted stabilization in the quantity, quality and layout of the cultivated land in China. Among them, the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) is one of the main grain-producing areas. In this study, a systematic synergy was proposed to evaluate the cultivated land use stability for the YRD in the period from 2000 to 2020. Three products of the land use were also fused, including China Land Cover Dataset (CLCD), China’s Annual Cropland Dataset (CACD), and Global Land-cover Product with Fine Classification System at 30m(GLC_FCS30D). The cultivated land data was firstly collected from the official statistical yearbooks and the Second National Land Survey. Secondly, the transition of the cultivated land use was combined with the ‘quantitative structure, spatial pattern and utilization’. A multi-dimensional evaluation was then constructed for the stability of the cultivated land use using the entropy weight. The scores of the districts and counties were calculated in the study area under three single dimensions. The stability of the cultivated land use was then partitioned at the district and county scales. Its spatiotemporal evolution patterns were finally obtained after evaluation. The results showed that: 1) The cultivated land area was ever decreasing using fusion data, with a decrease of about 49% in Shanghai, 30% in Zhejiang, 19% in Jiangsu, and 18% in Anhui. The fusion data was reduced the discrepancy between conventional cultivated land products and official statistics after spatial consistency analysis. The continuous data acquisition was realized on the small-scale cultivated land. 2) The stability of the cultivated land use was varied in the various single dimensions. But all of them generally showed the better stability in the northern part of the region, while the worse one in the southern. 3) According to the multi-dimensional stability of the cultivated land use, the counties were divided into four zones, namely the moderate optimization, priority enhancement, potential development and key regulation zone. The proportion was 37.99%, 9.42%, 15.91% and 36.69% respectively. Their spatiotemporal patterns show that the priority enhancement zones were tended to develop into the moderate optimization ones, while the key regulation zones were mostly transformed from the potential development ones. Therefore, the differentiated regulation should be implemented to overcome the dominant problems in each sub-region in the context of the dual challenges of the nature and human activities. This multi-dimensional evaluation of the cultivated land use stability can fully meet the needs of the regional development trend in the different stability zones. The finding can provide a strong reference to guide the stable protection and efficient use of the cultivated land in the agricultural modernization.