For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. Less well known is the fact that development of newly cultivated land has in fact consistently exceeded land conversion from 1999-2006. This paper provides an analytical model that makes sense of this observation, featuring fiscal decentralization, local governments as custodians of land use ...

The basic farmland within the protection areas was required to be of high-quality and connective in the general plans for land use. A new method was developed to delineate the boundaries of high-quality, concentrated and connective cultivated land. Based on mathematical morphology principles and GIS methods, the high quality of cultivated land blocks could be identified through dilation and ero...

We developed a method that analyzes the quality of the cultivated cropland class mapped in the USA National Land Cover Database (NLCD) 2006. The method integrates multiple geospatial datasets and a Multi Index Integrated Change Analysis (MIICA) change detection method that captures spectral changes to identify the spatial distribution and magnitude of potential commission and omission errors fo...

Due to the nature of available land as one of the main attractions for investment, land lease marketing in Sub-Saharan Africa is appearing on policy agenda. This paper describes critical land-related institutional and governmental frameworks that have shaped the contemporary land governance and land lease contracts in Ethiopia. It also examines the effectiveness of the land lease process regard...

Policy has long been considered one of the major driving forces for land-use/cover change. However, research on the interactions between land-use/cover change (LUCC) and relevant policies remains limited. The agropastoral ecotone is a typical area of policy implementation and LUCC. Therefore, this study integrates the use of multisource and multiresolution remote sensing and topographic and fie...

Understanding the historical change of agricultural landscape patterns is the basis for promoting the sustainable development of cultivated land, as well as appropriate decision-making. In order to analyze spatio-temporal changes of cultivated land in Sanjiang Plain, from 1985–2015, Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Operational Land Imager (OLI) were used to reconstruct satellite data of land us...

The chernozem has high productivity, most of which is located in Northeast of China. Considering the restrictions of land use and terrain and meteorological conditions, soil erosion and degradation often result in lower agricultural output than expected. Land consolidation is served to consolidate parcels and to enlarge holdings as well as included provisions such as irrigation, drainage infras...

While we know that deforestation in the tropics is increasingly driven by commercial agriculture, most tropical countries still lack recent and spatially-explicit assessments of the relative importance of pasture and cropland expansion in causing forest loss. Here we present a spatially explicit quantification of the extent to which cultivated land and grassland expanded at the expense of fores...