Land use change and driving factors in rural China during the period 1995-2015

Land use/cover change (LUCC) is the result of interaction between human activities and biophysical processes. Extensive researches have been done on LUCC in urban China, but the understanding on rural land-use remains relatively inadequate. Based on land use, socio-economic, topographic and climate data from 1995–2015, taking China’s 31,275 townships as the research object, this study applied land-use dynamic degree (LUDD), geo-detector model and bivariate spatial autocorrelation analysis to explore the spatio-temporal pattern and driving factors of LUCC in rural China. Results show that over the past two decades, significant changes have taken place in the type and structure of land use in rural China. The cultivated land increased in northeast and northwest China, and the built-up area increased in Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region as well as Henan and Anhui provinces. More than 80 % of built-up land expansion came from the occupation of cultivated land. The Loess Plateau, Sichuan Basin, Hebei, Henan, western Xinjiang and southern Jiangsu have experienced the most serious decline in arable land. The driving force of LUCC varied greatly with space, time and land use type. Socio-economic development was the main driving force for the built area expansion, and geographical differentiation was the dominant factor in the conversion of cultivated land, forest land and grassland. The intensity of population and economic growth driving built-up land expansion decreases from east to west, while that of terrain-driven conversion of cultivated land into forest land gradually increases from west to east. These findings would provide decision support for policy-makers to formulation future sustainable land use policies. At the same time, it would help to further promote the exploration of China’s complicated human-land relationship.