Mapping farmland preservation zone with a multi-level simulation model: A case study of Hubei Province, China
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1He, J.; 2Liu, Y.; 3Liu, Y.; 4Jiao, L.; 5Liu, D.
1SCHOOL OF RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, WUHAN UNIV. Email: hjianh@126.com
2SCHOOL OF RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, WUHAN UNIV. Email: yaolin610@163.com
3SCHOOL OF RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, WUHAN UNIV. Email: yfliu619@163.com
4SCHOOL OF RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, WUHAN UNIV. Email: lmjiao027@163.com
5SCHOOL OF RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, WUHAN UNIV. Email: liudf1985@163.com
Abstract
Sufficient farmland is of vital importance to a national food security, environmental services, protection of rural amenities, planned development patterns and a healthy economy and nowhere is this more true than in China. The dual pressures of population growth and urbanization of its vast rural population have led an increasing challenge for China’s food security and farmland preservation. To ensure adequate food for its 1.3 billion people has become a top priority for China’s policy. Various measures have been taken to tighten control over the conversion of high-quality farmland to non-agricultural purposes whether commercial, industrial or residential. However, the performances of these policies are unsatisfactory for preventing the amount of farmland from declining. The lack of a scientific method for zoning protected farmland has been recognized as a major reason. Farmland preservation zoning is a hierarchical decision-making process in China. Most of the existed approaches are focused on a single scale area, neglecting the spatial interactive effects among its neighborhoods and its adjacent level regions, which are not competent for China’s farmland preservation zoning. There two key issues should be dealt with in zoning farmland preservation at county-level, and which are what we focus our discussion on in this paperThe first issue is how to explicitly incorporate of multiple levels and their interactions into forecasting the demand of farmland for preservation. The second issue is how to spatial explicitly allocate the quantitative quota to land use parcels and zoning farmland preservation. An alternative approach to model the multi-level decision-making of farmland preservation zoning has been presented in this paper. The multi-level linking model developed to facilitate farmland preservation zoning in China is consisted of two sub-models at two scale-level: a meso-scale model at city/county level and micro-scale model at land use parcel level. At meso-scale, the multi-level analysis tool of STAR is combined with ANN approach, which is used to predict farmland demand with considering cross-level interactions and spatio-temporal dependencies. At micro-scale, the bottom-up optimizing approach of PSO is adopted to optimize the spatial locations and designate farmland preservation zones based on the biophysical and economic conditions of land use parcels. The case study is implemented by taken Hubei province of China as an example. The results show that the multi-level model is competent for zoning farmland preservation following the five-level administrative chain of China, in which the spatial interactive effects among its neighborhoods and its adjacent upper-level regions, as well spatial explicitly allocation the quantitative quota to land use parcels are integrated.
Keywords
farmland preservation zoning; multi-level modeling; mapping