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Rational construction of a well-facilitated farmland become necessary for food security and modern agriculture in China. In farmland construction, the automatic management of spatial data can benefit to accurately distinguish well-facilitated farmland from the various land types. Various discriminating ways of well-facilitated farmland are adopted due to the different influence factors of agricultural production in in different regions, where the spatial distribution and structural features of well-facilitated farmland are quite different from place to place across the country. Most of the previous studies focus mainly on policies, benefit evaluation, preliminary planning and design in the well-facilitated farmland construction. There is still lacking on the studies of the discrimination and analysis for the regional structural features of the well-facilitated farmland. In this paper, a framework of an index system was constructed to identify the spatial distribution and structural features of the well-facilitated farmland using the law of spatial differentiation together with the related national standards and strategic planning, ranging from the scale and shape of farmlands, irrigation and drainage facilities, traffic accessibility, and farmland protection ratio. The identifying system was designed on the basis of the index framework with C#. NET and Arc Object. Subsequently, the proposed system was verified for its availability by taking a case study of a Loess Plateau and a southern mountainous region. The results were as follows: (1) In the Loess Plateau area, the standard rate of the farmland scale, farmland shape, irrigation and drainage facilities, traffic accessibility was 87.01%, 83.12%, 80.52%, 90.91% and 83.12%, respectively. The well-facilitated farmland area can be identified by the system was 38.33 hm² with the total discriminating precision was 94.38%. There were some farmlands that did not meet the requirements of the well-facilitated farmland, such as incomplete irrigation and drainage facilities, the irregular shapes of the fields that distributed in the branch furrow and furrow head around the farmland. (2) In the southern mountainous area, the standard rate of all spatial features was 100%. The well-facilitated farmland area that identified by the system was 30.07 hm², which was 10.34 hm² higher than that of the state-approved well-facilitated farmland. The high identified areas can be because some fields that meet the requirements of well-facilitated farmland have not been classed as the permanent basic farmland in some administrative regions. When regardless of this classification, the total discrimination precision was 100%. This index system can be used in different scenarios, such as macro monitoring and evaluation, project design and inspection of the well-facilitated farmland. This system was also applied for the Northeast Plain, North China Plain, Loess Plateau and southern mountainous regions, while the key elements of the spatial features of well-facilitated farmland construction can be detected with a reliable discriminant resolution. When combining with the remote sensing technology, the index system can help automatic management to know the real-time spatial data of well-facilitated farmland construction. Therefore, the developed system can be successfully applied to identify the extract well-facilitated farmland in the construction area, and then to analyze the obtained spatial data in real time, finally to implement automatic management for well-facilitated farmland construction. Furthermore, the proposed system in this paper can offer a promising reference to the current comprehensive supervision platform, and improve the management effectiveness of well-facilitated farmland construction in modern agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land is the carrier of human activities. All kinds of social and economic problems in the process of urbanization can be reflected in land use. A large number of labor force has been transferred from rural areas especially in mountainous areas to cities, which has changed the population distribution pattern and land use pattern in different time and regional systems. The marginalization of cultivated land is a typical land use pattern in mountainous areas, and clarifying the characteristics of land marginalization and its mechanism can be used for reference to realize land capital appreciation and rural revitalization. By employing the survey data about 901 farm households involving 6563 plots in Wulong District and Youyang County in Chongqing City of China in 2012 and 2018 and compilation of agricultural product cost and benefit data from 2007 to 2017, this paper regarded cultivated land as an asset for families and revealed the evolution characteristics of cultivated land asset value in recent years, and a Probit model was constructed to identify the driving forces and explored the driving mechanism of abovementioned phenomena. The results showed that: 1) in recent years, the assets value of cultivated land in the investigated areas kept declining, which was manifested in the fact that the generally cultivated maize per km² has changed from yield to loss, and the average weighted net yield of major crops has decreased from 1 384.50 yuan per hm² in 2012 to 252.30 yuan per hm² in 2018, with a drop of 77.09%. The average rent of cultivated land dropped from 1577.45 yuan/hm² in 2012 to 361.65 yuan/hm² in 2018, while the proportion of rent-free land transfer rate from 71.09 % to 82.21 %. It can be seen that the assets value of cultivated land in typical mountainous areas in Chongqing are in the decline stage. (2) Plot size, the distance from the homestead, plot quality and land fragmentation were the important determinants of free-rent land transfer, while the rising opportunity cost of farming was the root cause. The mechanism of devaluation of cultivated land is that urbanization has pushed up labor costs and reduces agricultural profits, and cultivated land assets have devaluated and even abandoned. From the view of cost-benefit analysis, the abandonment of cultivated land in the study area is a normal and rational economic activity for farmers, and the devaluation of cultivated land assets is exactly in line with the original intention of returning farmland to forests. The devalued cultivated land or abandoned land of these assets is conducive to improving the ecological environment of the mountainous areas. At the same time, the idle or abandoned land resources in mountainous areas become relatively rich. The government should reasonably introduce urban capital and fully exploit the land resources in order to realize the land capital appreciation in mountainous areas and develop local economy. Furthermore, the government should stop large-scale land reclamation projects in mountainous areas and appropriately replenish cultivated land through land reclamation to avoid waste of public financial funds and destruction of the ecological environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to study the coupling relationship between rural population and rural residential land area change and promote the economization and intensification level of rural residential land, in this paper the Tapio decoupling model was introduced to reveal the decoupling degree of rural population-land change. From the perspective of urban and rural demographic shift, the factors decomposition model for rural residential land expansion was established. The logarithmic mean Divisia index (LMDI) was adopted to quantitatively analyze the influencing factors accounting for the changes in rural residential land area. The change of rural residential land area was decomposed into 4 main driving effects including rural residential land intensive use effect, urban-rural population structure effect, urbanization effect and total population effect. The addition decomposition method was used to measure the magnitude of 4 driving effects. The rural residential land area of China (1996-2016) and 31 provinces or municipalities (2000-2016) were taken as example. The results show that China has experienced rapid urban-rural transformation in the past few years. Rural population continues to decrease, presenting a 30.7 percent decline. But in the meantime, the total area of rural residential land increases continuously. The changes in rural residential land area among different provinces (municipalities) varied obviously, and overall the eastern and western regions indicated a greater growth. The relationship between rural population and rural residential land change is uncoordinated, and rural residential land tends to be more extensively utilized. From the decoupling index of China and 31 provinces or municipalities, the decoupling relationship between rural population and residential land area change were mainly characterized by strong negative decoupling. The degree of negative decoupling in the eastern and western regions was more serious than that in the central areas. What's more, the degree of negative decoupling is generally deteriorating. The values of 4 driving effects were measured from 1996-2016. The results indicated that the scale of rural residential land in China increased by 2.020×105 hm2 from 1996 to 2008 including a decrease of 116.833×105 hm2 caused by urban-rural population structure effect, and the increase of 33.497×105, 71.813×105, 13.544×105 hm2 for rural residential land intensive use effect, urbanization effect and total population effect, respectively. Additionally, during 2009-2016, the scale of rural residential land in China increased by 7.275×105 hm2. The rural residential land intensive use effect, urbanization effect and total population effect caused the increase of 36.689×105, -68.271×105, 32.164×105, 6.692×105 hm2, respectively. Among 4 driving effects, the urban-rural population structure effect was stronger than the others. The contribution of 4 driving effects to the change in rural residential land area in different periods performed differently. The value of urbanization effect was greater than that of rural residential land intensive use effect during 1996-2008, but after 2009, the rural residential land intensive use effect gradually exceeded the urbanization effect, and become the dominant factor caused the increase of rural residential land. Therefore, strengthening the planning and management of rural residential land, gradually promoting rural residential land consolidation, and actively exploring the exit mechanism of rural residential land may be effective measures for improving the intensification level of rural land use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, there are still a large number of poverty-stricken counties in the western part of China. Although the government has recently increased financial support for rural areas, and the policy guidelines have been steadily tilting toward rural areas, especially poor rural areas, rural poverty is still difficult to resolve. In order to reasonably determine the optimal layout direction of rural settlements in poor mountainous areas, and put forward some scientific guidance in the rural land remediation and new rural construction in mountainous areas, this paper took Xundian Hui and Yi Autonomous County, a former national poverty-stricken county that was out of poverty in 2018, as a research area, and used the methods of remote sensing interpretation, GIS analysis, landscape shape index model, buffer analysis, Kernel density estimation and Getis-Ord Gi* to study the evolution characteristics and influencing factors of rural settlements in Xundian County from 2001 to 2017 in terms of space, scale and form. The research results showed that: 1) During 2001-2017, there were some changes in the scale, density, shape and spatial distribution of rural settlements in Xundian County. The main changes were as follows: from 2001 to 2017, the overall scale of rural settlements had expanded significantly, the landscape shape tended to be regular, and the average patch size increased; the characteristics of rural settlements clustering in areas with superior terrain were becoming more and more obvious. The analysis results of kernel density and Getis-Ord Gi* showed that the spatial divergence characteristics of rural settlements patch scales were apparent, and the distribution patterns were gradually expanding from small-scale decentralization to large-scale clustering; 2) The natural geographical factors such as geological and topographical conditions were the basic factors that influencing the distribution pattern of rural settlements in mountainous areas. The basic pattern of spatial distribution of rural settlements in mountainous areas is the result of long-term adaptation to topographic and geomorphological conditions; 3) Socio-economic factors, location factors and policy factors were the important factors influencing the change of spatial distribution. As the urban-rural income gap increased, the rural population of Xundian County flew to urban areas, so rural settlements were more concentrated in urban areas; the results of the neighborhood analysis of towns and roads also indicated that rural settlements tended to be concentrated in the distribution of towns and roads. In addition, the precise poverty alleviation policy with relocation as the main means was another major factor leading to the concentration of rural settlements in the plain areas with superior terrain conditions. According to the study, for mountainous rural areas with scarce natural resources, the poverty alleviation in mountainous areas should rely mainly on industrial assistance rather than policy assistance in the future. The local government should focus on increasing the employment opportunities of farmers and improving the livelihood conditions of farmers. Only in this way can we really help the poor and achieve the rural revitalization. This study can provide a practical guidance for the poverty alleviation work in the rural areas of the southwestern frontiers with frequent geological disasters; also provide a scientific theoretical basis for the optimization of the spatial layout of rural settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The livability evaluation of living space was an important topic, which had important guiding significance for improving the livability of living space.This study aimed to explore the theoretical logical relationship between the multi-function of land use and livability of living space, and make use of the research about multi-function of land use for the optimization practice of livability of living space. So, this paper discussed the theoretical logical relationships between multiple functions of land use and livability of living space from the perspective of human needed products and services supplied by land use, and the evaluation index system was built based on the relationship and previous research. And then, the scheme of index spatialization was designed based on the technology of geographical information system(GIS) and remote sensing(RS). At the same time, multi-source data like remote sensing, survey, statistical and other spatialdataset were integrated by analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to quantify the spatial distribution of living space in ZhangbeiCounty, Hebei Province. The results showed that the livability of living space in ZhangbeiCounty presented the trend that the high value center was concentrated in the ZhangbeiTown and the subcenterwas distributed in Ertai-ShagouTown. The living space area above relatively strong levelwas only 2.42% of all county area.The spatial distribution characteristics of 3 types of land use were significantly difference;livingbearing function presented a trend like network distribution takingmain traffic trunk line as high value axis and ZhangbeiCounty as high value center. Living support function presented 2 groupsof high value centerscontaining the ZhangbeiTownand the north of YoulougouTown, and Ertai-shagouTown. The high value center of mental purification function was distributed in the ZhangbeiTown and the subcenterwas distributed in the area along the southwest of ZhangbeiTown to DaheTown and Ertai-shagouTown. There was a large difference in the distribution of livability between towns and villages. Most of the areas of livability space in town land were above the moderate level, especially, the area the livability level of which belonged to the higher and highest accounted for 78.37% of the total area of the town land, and meanwhile, accounted for 74.94% of the total area with higher and highest level of living space. This area was mainly distributed in the town of Zhangbei, Ertaiand Shagou, and YoulougouVillage. Most of the livability areas in rural land were under the moderate level, and the area oflower and lowest level accounted for 78.39% of the total area of the rural land, whatwas more, accounted for 95.32% of the total area with lower and lowest level of living space. This area was mainly concentered in the town ofHailiutu, Erquanjing, Dahe, Danjinghe, and Liangmianjing. The spatial difference of the functional elements of land use was the main reason to the difference in livability of living space. So, according to the above results, some conclusions can be drawn in this research. The villages, which containlarge lower and lowest livability space area, are the key areas of primary concern inthe implementation process of the“Revitalizing the countryside” strategy; what’s more, the theory and method of land use multi-function can be applied to the study of livability evaluation of living space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]