Socio-economic driving forces of arable land conversion: A case study of Wuxian City, China

Accelerated restructuring in rural China fueled by ‘increasing vs. decreasing balance’ land-use policy for dealing with hollowed villages

“…China has experienced drastic changes in land use since the initiation of economic reforms in 1978, especially through the loss of farmland to construction, driven primarily by urbanization and industrialization (Lin and Ho, 2003;Liu et al, 2008;Long et al, 2007;Qu et al, 1995;Xie et al, 2005;Zhong et al, 2011). Between 1996 and 2008, total farmland in China decreased by approximately 8.32 Mha, or about 6.4% (MLRC, 2009), whilst during the same period China's population increased from 1224 million to 1328 million, with the proportion living in urban areas rising from 30.5% to 45.7% (NBSC, 2009).…”

Agricultural landscape change in China's Yangtze Delta, 1942–2002: A case study

“…Our case study has demonstrated that rural population growth, land policy change, introduction of new agricultural technologies and economics have all interacted to cause significant fine-scale changes in densely populated agricultural village landscapes in the Yangtze Delta over the past 60 years (Lambin et al, 2001;Dö ö s, 2002;Xie et al, 2005;Fu et al, 2006;Long et al, 2007a,b). Moreover, this study confirms that substantial long-term changes can occur in agricultural landscapes even when this is only the aggregate result of large numbers of fine-scale landscape transformations .…”

Integrated studies of physical geography in China: Review and prospects

“…The driving forces of LUCC are diverse and scale-dependent, among which a wide variety of socio-economic and physical factors have been identified. Socio-economic factors include economic development (Liu et al, 2014a), population growth (Liu et al, 2005), policy regulation (Xie et al, 2005), urbanization , land use management (Yu et al, 2011), advances of science and technology (Hai et al, 2005), road construction (Liang et al, 2014), and enhancement of environmental awareness (Fan et al, 2012). Physical factors include climatic change (Gao et al, 2006;Song et al, 2009), geomorphological processes (Wang et al, 2005a), water availability (Zhang et al, 2006), and land-ocean interactions .…”