“…With the development of remote sensing (RS) and geographic information system (GIS) technology, many researchers have described and explained the location, distribution, patterns, structure, changing characteristics, and function transition of rural settlements (Rey and Bachvarov, 1998;Gude et al, 2006;Feng et al, 2007;Yan et al, 2014;Jiang et al, 2022). The factors and driving forces affecting the evolution of rural settlements have been clarified and include natural geographic elements, demographics, infrastructure, industrial transformation, macroeconomic policies, and household behavior Conrad et al, 2015;Amado et al, 2018;Rosner and Wesołowska, 2020;Zhang et al, 2023). Changes to rural settlements have nonnegligible environmental impacts, such as farmland and paddy soil loss in metropolitan areas (Chen and Taniguchi, 2016;Zhou et al, 2022) and environment damage in watersheds (Liao et al, 2023).…”