Work

Identifying the potential construction areas and priorities of well-facilitated farmlands by developing a simple but robust method: A case study in dryland agriculture regions based on public data

Year: 2024

Type: article

Abstract: Well-facilitated farmland (WFF) construction is greatly responsible for agricultural sustainable development. How to quantitatively plan the WFF construction distribution and schedule is still ambiguity. This study thus introduced a simple but robust method, and took the typical dryland Yulin city to spatially identify its potential WFF construction areas and temporally determine construction priorities based on public data. By integrating satellite-observed croplands with survey-based statistic data, this study firstly obtained density maps of constant croplands. We found that constant cropland densities decreased from west to east in Yulin city. Western Jingbian and Dingbian counties gave relatively dense distributions. Secondly, by overlaying evaluation indictors of WFF construction, we found over 96% of constant croplands had WFF construction potentials. Slope and fraction vegetation coverage (FVC) showed evidently spatial differences, which comprehensively reflected the potentials and difficulties of WFF construction. Therefore, an index SF, by considering normalized slope and FVC, was subsequently introduced to rank potential WFF construction priorities. According to the completion ratio and the assumption that giving priorities to develop better basic condition regions, batches of WFF construction areas were identified under the scenario of equally annual planning for each county (S1). Besides, a scenario of city-wide unified planning (S2) was also discussed. WFF construction areas in S2 were further concentrated in northwestern counties compared to those in S1. Both scenarios recommended that construction priorities were given to northwestern counties. This study could provide valuable references for arranging distributions and schedules of WFF construction.

Source: International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation

DOI: 10.1016/j.jag.2024.104166

Authors: Zhengjia Liu, Yihang Huang, Yongsheng Wang, Zhaosheng Wang

Institutions: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Language: English

Topic: Soil and Land Suitability Analysis

Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Zero hunger, Sustainable cities and communities

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,820